Decorating the BugCycle Garden with Gudrun Sjödén

Worthing's BugCycle community garden has just become even more colourful thanks to a generous donation from Gudrun Sjödén, Swedish designer of sustainable fashion and champion of environmentally conscious design. Gudrun kindly sent us a bundle of eco-cotton fabrics and home furnishings to use in our burgeoning wildlife garden.

BugCycle was set up by community arts producers Creative Waves in partnership with Worthing Wildlife to regenerate an area in one of the town's central parks. Since February this year, we and a team of volunteers have transformed a disused part of Beach House Park using largely found, recycled and donated materials into a living, educational, sensory garden for all to enjoy.

Gudrun Sjödén sent us a selection of Långrand striped organic cottons in delicious shades of guava/turquoise, lavendula/sky, asparagus/pineapple and peony. I decided to make gardening hats and aprons for our volunteers to wear, as well as some cushions and bright bunting to decorate and furnish the garden. I used these fabulous fabrics together with some Gudrun Sjödén material left over from previous projects.

The aprons are based on Gudrun's perfectly practical Nyttan gardening apron with one large divided wrap around pocket and long fastening ties (I'm wearing a ruby red Nyttan apron in these photos). The hats are made using Etsy shop WorthyGoods super Over The Top sun hat sewing pattern. I sewed simple envelope back cushion covers from the Långrand cotton to complement two of Gudrun's Melissa and Flox print cushions. All left over pieces of fabric were cut into triangles of different sizes and sewn into colourful bunting. Not a scrap of material was wasted!

These photos were taken at a Creative Waves BugCycle Art in the Park workshop, but on another day you could see the Worthing Wildlife Team at work here, one of the town's community groups or up to 120 local school children using the garden as an outdoor learning space.

We'd like to thank Gudrun Sjödén for bringing her Swedish design with a green soul to our own very green and thriving community garden!

Gudrun's eco-cotton fabrics and home furnishings are available from her web shop.

Seeking Occupants of Interplanetary Craft at Earthship Brighton

It's been a beautiful sunny week in Sussex, a fine start to the school holidays and a complete contrast to last year's bitter Easter holiday weather. On Wednesday we travelled by train to Stanmer Park, a nature reserve with open downland and woods on the edge of Brighton. Our event horizon was Earthship Brighton a sustainable 'green' building constructed using waste car tyres, wine bottles and recycled materials. It's the first Earthship to be built in England and has been designed to provide its own heat, electricity, water and food. Our walk there took us through wide open spaces, blossom heavy orchards and through the grounds of Stanmer Manor where we stopped for a picnic. Continuing uphill we passed allotments, a forest of roughly carved wooden faces (with eyes that followed us) and getting warmer, reached Stanmer Community Farm.

The Earthship was closed but we explored the outside of this intriguing building and its grounds which resemble a glorious eco-friendly Teletubby Land. Heading back downhill we sensibly took a detour to Stanmer Park Tearooms and refuelled with tea and cake before hiking back to Falmer Station.

On Highdown Hill

The day after Saint Jude's storm saw calm blue skies with bright puffy clouds over Worthing. I headed up to Highdown with friends to breathe some South Downs air and hike across the breezy hilltop. Our children scrambled through long grass, explored ditches and climbed trees while we marvelled at the splendid views across Worthing and out to sea – blighted only by the sight of a sprawling Asda superstore.

As the air began to chill we gambolled back down the hill to Highdown Tearooms and refuelled with huge glasses of hot chocolate with whipped cream and generous portions of cake before investigating Highdown's chalk gardens. 

The children disappeared in a game of hide and seek and we could've stayed another hour enjoying the rich autumn colours but were driven out by the sound of a ringing bell warning us that the gardens were about to close.

Worthing's Pigeon War Memorial

The centrepiece of the formal flowerbeds in Worthing's Beach House Park is a memorial to the unsung heroes of the Second World War – the Warrior Birds of our National Pigeon Service. These brave carrier birds conveyed messages and made contact with allied agents throughout Europe during WWII. Most RAF bombers carried two pigeons and in an emergency the birds would fly home so that teams of rescuers could be alerted. Thousands of lives were saved by these tenacious creatures who often flew in extremely harsh skies. Secret armies of pigeons were regularly dropped behind enemy lines and used to relay messages from resistance members to 'Wing House' in London.

This unique memorial was commissioned and funded by theatre director, author, conservationist and celebrated actor Nancy Price in 1949 and opened to the public in 1951. Founder of The People's National Theatre, Price was a star of stage and screen and I was thrilled to discover that she played the role of 'Mrs Crozier' in Powell and Pressburger's 1945 masterpiece I Know Where I'm Going!. There are many local stories about Nancy Price and Valerie Martin is collecting them on her wonderful Findon Village website.

The Warrior Birds monument is a lovely peaceful place to visit and after years of neglect is now tended by Adur and Worthing Council. Unfortunately the rockery is gated and kept locked – perhaps unnecessarily as the park has a warden and is also closed from dusk until dawn. For the past two years a memorial service for the wartime carrier birds has been held in the Beach House Park in November. I hope this is a tradition that will continue and that the birds are remembered for many years to come.

If the plight of wartime pigeons has piqued your interest I recommend watching Richard Cane's documentary War Of The Birds - streamed here.

Peepo! at The Quashetts

A walk down one of Worthing's ancient twittens The Quashetts becomes a game of Peepo as we peer through various knot holes in the wooden fences. Brief glimpses into other people's lives show us rusting garden furniture waiting for warmer days, well tended plants in terracotta pots, sprawling overgrown weeds in the next garden (a haven for wildlife), shiny polished double-glazed windows with a forbidding burglar alarm, abandoned moss covered children's play equipment and a solid brick wall built right up against the fence.
From our viewpoint not much is revealed but we feel like cat-burglars for looking. I hope no one saw us...

Autumnal Equinox in Worthing

Autumn closes in. This glorious tree in Homefield Park boasts leaves of rich ruby red while the other trees around it are still green with just a few rust tinged leaves between them. It's a trailblazing tree, too impatient to wait for today's autumnal equinox!  Last week my daughter found her first conker in the Quashetts - the ancient twitten we walk through en route to school. Friday's journey home saw us colliding with cobwebs and we spotted three huge stripy yellow spiders invisibly suspended in mid-air.
   Another autumnal phenomenon in these parts seems to be the discarding of musical instruments in the street. I longed to take this upright piano home (but how to carry and where to put it?) and puzzled over the Westminster radiogram abandoned at the side of the road. Meanwhile the yellow rose bush in my garden continues to bloom, oblivious to the change in the air.