This Saturday sees the return of The Three Greens Festival in Emersons Green Park! We look forward to seeing you there. We have a whole set of fascinating events and activities lined up for you throughout the day all designed to help Emersons Green and Lyde Green celebrate our relationship with the Earth. The programme is published and available for you to download here.

The day begins, as previously, with a parade from the Langley Arms. Aim to get there for 9.30am so you can collect some flowers and make headdresses. The parade will set off at 10am going on a much shorter route this year including Green Lane (or the parallel path for those with pushchairs) and will end at the new willow dome in the park.

Returning to the main tent we will be met by the Brigstowe Village Band, all dressed up in their marvellous rural costumes and complete with their hobby horse.

Various events will leave from reception (opposite the main tent) at 10.30am including

Then at 11am meet Kino at reception and walk to Green lane for one of the most fascinating experiences you have ever seen. Whispering Woods will perform a set that includes aerial acrobatics, music and a Scottish story called Tamlin.

Back at the main tent at 11.30am join Mangotsfield School Choir as they raise the roof for us and celebrate on the theme of the festival.

at 11.30am and again at 12.30pm meet at reception and join Ed Drewitt for a Bug Hunt on Emersons Green Common, complete with sweep nets and trays and learn to identify some of the insects that lives among the flowers and grasses.

At 1pm we welcome Bristol European Jazz Ensemble to the main tent. Enjoy your lunch from our lovely food stalls as you listen to some truly extraordinary music with an international flavour.

Alternatively if you are feeling active at 12.30pm you might like to try your hand at Circus Skills. World Jungle will be with us offering a workshop in the area next to the Junior playground. (Workshop repeats at 2.30pm)

In case you missed it the first time Whispering Woods performance will repeat at 2pm. Meet at reception.

Join Kate and friends for a community litter pick, around the park and neighbourhood at 2pm.

Ed’s last session at 2.30pm will be called Signs of Wildlife and will show how you can detect some of the various plants and creatures who use the park.

All day long there will be displays of various sorts around the park especially in the smaller tent and the formal garden including craft stalls and children’s activities. Don’t forget to check out the competition entries (see here for details and entry form) in the library and other activities there. A competition prizegiving will take place at 3.45pm in the main tent. Toilets are available all day until 4pm in the Village Hall.

When you have enjoyed the day outside and feel like a moment of quiet reflection, what better way than to join us in the Village Hall at 7.30pm for an evening of wonderful music on guitar, flute and voice from Francisco Correa and Emily Andrews. Cantare is a paid for event see here for more details.

This day is brought to you by Friends of Emersons Green Park with help from many others. Please invite your friends and family. It is set to be a great day!

Is there anything more majestic than this old oak that presides over our orchard?

Human beings are coming to see the importance of nature and to sense our part of it all.

With that in mind, we are pleased to announce our Gardening for Wildlife Garden Open day on June 4th when there will be a number of gardens in the area open to visitors. Each of the gardens is deliberately doing something special for nature. They are not trying to be perfect gardens or even tidy gardens, but our hope is to inspire others with new ideas about what can be done in relation to nature. Added together gardens make up a huge area of land with enormous potential for biodiversity. Details of the day in this poster and the associated map here.

This will be followed closely by our Three Greens Festival on June 18th, which is packed with really interesting events. Go bug hunting with Ed Drewitt, practice your circus skills, watch the Whispering Wood Folk as they hang from trees and enchant us with tales, hear local children sing, meet the Hobby Horse, encounter Jazz from different traditions, settle down to an evening concert of the finest music. All of this and more at this year’s festival. More details to follow. Our Friends of Emersons Green Park Facebook group will also be highlighting the contributors. Posters for the festival are now available. Please download it from here and spread the word.

Meanwhile don’t forget the orchard where all the fruit is soon to emerge. The bees tell me that the raspberries will soon be ready.

This weekend is known as the Spring Equinox, when almost everywhere round the world shares an equal length of day and night.

This weekend also marks the midpoint between deepest, darkest December and Midsummer, when, this year, we will be holding our Three Greens Festival. Hooray! We have an exciting line-up emerging for our festival this year and we will be giving some sneak previews here and on our Facebook Group as we count down to festival day on June 18^th.

A group of us spent an intriguing couple of hours yesterday with the naturalist, Ed Drewitt exploring Green Lane. Some people have called it Muddy Lane in the past and with good reason!  We were consulting Ed on how to increase biodiversity in the lane and were pleased that two Town Councillors were with us on the day, because they manage this land and can give permission for any work.  We came up with some great ideas and I will share more when we have received Ed’s report.

We also experienced a very unusual event a few weeks ago with the artist Nick Hand at Centrespace in Bristol. Nick is a specialist in Letterpress printing and has machines, whose design dates right back to the 1400s and the Gutenberg Press. We made some lovely prints, like this one, some of which will find their way into a new A-Z of the local area that Nick is putting together.

Walk around the park today and you may hear the woodpecker drumming, or see the little egret wading around in the Langley pond. You might spot the blue flash of the Kingfisher, see a bullfinch near the new wildlife garden or find tadpoles in the slack water. Herons have been spotted again at Lyde Green Lake and so many of  the plants are just coming into leaf – so breathe deep and feel the Spring.

In the last few weeks we have built a willow dome just below the toddlers playground. The idea, as long as it survives Storm Eunice, which is raging as I write, is that the dome should root itself, as willow does, and leaf all over. We shall see. In the meantime it is delightful to see how so many children naturally take the path through the dome on their little explorations. This picture of us yesterday was a particularly tough day, turning over wet turf ready for the sowing of wildflower seeds.

This is also to alert you to a special event on Monday 28th of February at 7pm in the library entitled ‘Gardening for Wildlife‘ where three people will tell their stories about creating a garden, not just for themselves, but specially for wildlife. We hope that two of these gardens, along with others in this area, will be open to the public at a ‘Gardening for Wildlife’ Open Day in June. I know that lots of us are interested these days in how we can help nature thrive and our gardens are a phenomenal resource. Come and join us at the library to discover more. All welcome.

In other news I am grateful to South Glos for informing us that the rough paths on the wilder side of the park are to be refurbished soon, restoring their intended width and recoating with similar material. There will also be a new path between the hedge circle, on the way back from the shops, to the main playground. That will be tarmac.

I am also pleased to report that there will also be another attempt to sort out ‘stinky bridge’ as many have come to call it!

Have you ever thought how art and nature really belong together? The natural world is really the most spectacular display of art we could ever imagine and a such a stimulus to our own imagination.

Christine has been enjoying making these. Have you spotted them in the park?

The new wildlife garden has also developed its own fairy house, which feels like great fun. See if you can find it.

On the same theme, now that we can meet together again, I am delighted to announce a special winter meeting, this Wednesday Feb 2nd at 7pm in the library, where we are meeting with the artist Nick Hand who has been commissioned to do a piece of community art in his own style. Nick is an expert at Letterpress printing. Come along and help him consider what might be best for our community. Details and a poster you can share can be found here.

The week following, on Feb 9th at 7pm, (original post had 9pm in error, thanks to Jeff for pointing this out) we also invite you to join us online, when we shall be meeting with Matthew Lipton, South Glos Commons and Biodiversity Manager, on the subject of ‘Caring for Wildlife in our Local Area’. We hope that we as a community might be able to contribute to developing ‘local nature action plans’ that are currently being rolled out nationally through town and parish councils. Details and a poster to share are here. Email friendsegpark@gmail.com to get your Zoom invitation.

Finally, we are looking forward to the year ahead and planning a Three Greens Festival again this year, to be held on June 18th. We hope it will be bigger and better in all sorts of ways and will be doing some initial planning at The Langley Arms on Monday Feb 7th at 8pm. Please come and join us if you would like to help.

The days are getting lighter now by more than a minute each day and the thrushes know about it, calling out their territories in the early morning. We can also see evidence of new growth as the humble cow parsley stretches out its new green leaves.

Our orchard group continued work on the new wildlife garden near the village hall right up to December 23rd and it is now looking great with its own dead hedge, compost heap, pond, frog shelter, bird table and lots of bulbs in the ground waiting for Spring.

With winter well and truly set in, we thought it might be good to run a few meetings on a wildlife/nature theme. We are looking at something on nature and art, another on gardening for wildlife and a third on making a local nature action plan. More details to follow shortly.

Meantime let me leave you with this blackbird, who just wanted you to know that he was enjoying rustling among the leaves this morning. Best wishes for a great year to come.

We have been asked by the Village Hall to help develop something of nature interest in the area where the Hall borders the park. Now that our regular team of workers has expanded, I am delighted to report that we are able to take this on and South Glos have given us permission to manage this area.

We are going to be planting woodland shade loving wild flowers and bulbs, creating a habitat log pile, putting in a small pond as a water source for the creatures in the park, making a compost heap, and a refuge for amphibians and reptiles, along with putting up a bird table and more. Sounds like great fun and special thanks to Christine for masterminding this and drawing these plans

Now for something very different – Some of you may have spotted the strange tanks sitting on the ground behind the garage on Emerson Way. I thought they looked like bouncy castles at first! But not so. it seems that in order to desilt this pond they floated a machine on the water and sucked up the sediment into these tanks where they will sit for some months while the water gradually leaks out. Then they can remove the silt. Mystery solved.

Also – on a rather sad note, it was a pity to see that the monkey puzzle tree, which has been such a landmark behind the Langley, has finally been felled. This old tree was, I gather, more than a hundred years old, but was seriously diseased and had all but died.

The AGM of Friends of Emersons Green Park was held at the Langley this year. We enjoyed a lively discussion followed by a meal. If you would like to catch up on what we talked about – check out the minutes here.

I hope you enjoy this occasional digest of news. Please note that, thanks to Amanda, we now also have an active Facebook group called Friends of Emersons Green Park. Join us there if you like for more immediate news about our activities and ways to get involved.

it might be a bit of a mess for a few weeks but there is water in the Langley Pond again. Hurrah! As promised the works have started to desilt our ponds and restore them to something that is pleasant to look at and good for wildlife. Works on the middle ponds will follow and include some partial dams on the streams that feed them to try to collect silt before it gets to the main ponds. This might make it easier to desilt in future years.

The orchard group is still hard at work and has put in several wildflower areas in the last few weeks and we are hoping shortly to make a ‘dead hedge’ along the bridle path so as to stop the brambles encroaching and provide a refuge for wildlife. Thanks to Chris G for this pictorial explanation.

We are planning to hold this year’s AGM for Friends of Emersons Green Park at the Langley Arms on Monday Nov 22nd at 7pm. The management committee will be elected and we will be thinking about plans for the coming year. All are invited. The formal meeting will end at around 8pm and then those who would like to are invited to stay on for a meal together (on a pay for your own basis). Please let me know if you are coming and if you will be staying for the meal via the comment on this blog or otherwise, so we have some idea of numbers.

Finally I thought some of you might be interested in an ebook that I have just published about the environmental crisis. It is a serious-minded book, but to give you a flavour, the first chapter opens with a scene from the orchard and the conclusion includes these words

The book offers an opportunity to create a movement in the world that is composed of ordinary people, who are not necessarily environmental activists. In fact, activism of any sort may not be their thing. But they can see their way to taking part in a festival that celebrates the earth. They can see the possibility of developing a local community orchard or garden. Or even forming a community agriculture project. They can sense the importance of setting aside land for nature. And in doing these things they will change inside. Their imaginations will grow. Their community will be strengthened. And one day the earth will feel like home.

It was a great time, wonderful weather and, at times, deeply moving. Thanks to all those who contributed to making the Three Greens Festival such a success. The parade was magnificent, full of colour and celebration. Apple pressing and wood weaving proved fascinating and the variety of music much appreciated. Brigstowe Village band in all their costumes.; Clube De Choro with a taste of South America and then in the evening Francisco and Emily brought us music, like few of us have heard before. Meanwhile Ed was taking trails round our nature heartlands and Shaun introduced us to the wildflowers. And there it was, Hobby horse and straw bales, stretch tent and hazel sculpture, Lyde and Emersons together, celebrating our relationship with the Earth.

We chose the date to coincide, as near as we could, with the Autumn Equinox, the time when day and night are the same length all round the Earth. And when it came round to the next Saturday, I realised how fortunate we had been, because it hammered down with rain. Should we do it again? What do you think?

Moving on from the festival, you will be interested to hear that major works are about to take place in the Park. In a few weeks time expect to see diggers and lorries engaged in desilting our ponds as well as others managing trees and generally improving the area around the ponds so as to encourage biodiversity. The ponds have been almost totally silted up this year, so this is all very welcome, even if it will cause some disruption in the short term. Our thanks to South Glos for keeping us in the picture.

Festival organisers met last night and decided, for a number of reasons, including some Covid complications, that we should combine the Emersons and Lyde parades, pool our resources this year and have just one parade that starts at the Langley Arms.

So come and join us at the Langley on Saturday morning. Wear your hats if you have made one. Bring some flowers or other things from nature if you can, but don’t worry, we plan to supply some flowers. Suggested gathering time 9.45am ready for a 10am start.

Please spread the word about this change.