We had a work day last Sunday at the Park, it was a beautiful day so lots of volunteers turned up and it’s starting to look good now.
I did some more work on the Twigwam though its far from finished, the structure is there now. I need to bind some of it up with some sort of twine or raffia, something that doesn’t quite cover but will make it more of an enclosed space. Plan then is to ask kids to collect leaves, feathers etc form around the park and start filling in the gaps.
Hayley turned up with her husband and they worked hard at retrieving bricks from the back of the site, some of them covered in moss and were beautiful.
She did a test run of one of the insect habitats on a stone base, I’ve added a photo. I think it’s great, love the idea that we’re fighting the land owner who is a builder, he wants to take the butterfly park back for construction purposes and here we are building multi-storey flats on site (albeit for insects.)
I also got very up close and personal with a pair of mating tortoiseshell butterflies, they stayed very still and didn’t fly away, for obvious reasons.
It was the A.G.M of the Butterfly Park Monday night It was interesting in that I used to work in the past for large charities that had a really good turnover of donations through grants and fundraising. This is so different, hardly any fundraising as such goes on, it’s nearly all through donations of visitors and well wishers really and there is hardly any money at all considering they are a charity. Don’t get me wrong, they can cover the costs of running the place but not much else.
It has a lot to do with the landowner, if the Council can complete the complusory purchase order and secure the safety of the park, they can start applying for grants then. It’s impossible to apply for funding for workshops not knowing if you’re actually going to be there in the future. In court on 11th May.
So much hangs on this, I’ve grown so attached to the site, it would be heartbreaking to see it go back into the hands of a builder.
