Grass Clippings
As spring starts to shift into gear there’s much activity around our grounds as we prepare for events in all sporting areas of the Club. With a little rain to assist us and longer day length, we are starting to see a little growth, but some warming sun would be welcome to help things chug along.
The golf calendar is kicking into gear, and a number of our high profile Club tournaments are appearing fast on the horizon. After two years of cancelled events, it is nice to see Members back enjoying structured competitions for the silverware we have on display in the Clubhouse.
When weather conditions allow, the Air Hall covering courts 12, 13 and 14 will be dismantled returning the courts to outdoor courts for the summer.
The work to prepare the grass courts for play is gaining pace and some of the maintenance work usually done in autumn, has been completed in the springtime due to the unpredictable nature of recent winter months. October through to December and the early spring can be wet months which are disastrous for the processes of top dressing and aerating the courts.
There has been considerable renovation on or around the croquet lawns this winter and the team are now concluding the tasks that they aimed to achieve. We are turfing Lawn Four this week, which was reduced in size last year for the padel tennis area. We have had to wait until the small pavilion and boundary wall renovations to be completed before starting to turf the northern end of the lawn.
In the gardens, Sam and the team are busy completing spring pruning of shrubs and planting some bare areas before the weather changes. In all, it is a busy time at the Club and it’s only going to become more frantic once there is a little more sun in the sky.
Tower of London
The Tower of London will be a pageant of colour this summer as the area of the old moat flourishes with a vibrant field of flowers creating a welcoming new habitat for wildlife in the urban landscape of the City of London. The ‘Superbloom’ will then evolve throughout the summer, becoming a haven for pollinators and creating a stunning spectacle of changing colours and patterns, flowering until September. The display has been set in motion as part of the efforts around the city to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee this summer. The seeds have been selected by Nigel Dunnett, Professor of Planting Design and Urban Horticulture at the University of Sheffield, who is the lead horticulturist on the project and has designed the planting scheme. These mixes feature red Poppies, yellow Corn Marigolds, and blue Cornflowers. In addition to the wildflowers, a range of garden plants are also included in the seed mixes to heighten the colour effects and to extend the season of flowering to cover the whole summer, before and after the wildflowers reach their peak. Sunflowers, Cosmos and Rudbeckias will flower into early autumn, and the snapdragon-like Fairy Toadflax, and Baby’s Breath will bloom at the very beginning of the summer.
Extensive landscape work has already taken place in the Tower’s moat to prepare for the display. Winding paths have been installed and are being lined with woven willow edging. A willow sculpture, made by artist Spencer Jenkins, already occupies the moat’s northeast corner. Finally, over the course of the past three months, 10,000 metric tonnes of soil have been deposited in the moat via a huge conveyor belt, which will move out as the seeds finally move in. The ‘Superbloom’ soil has been carefully calibrated by soil specialists to support the growth of a continuously evolving floral display. Consisting of two thirds subsoil and one third topsoil, it contains a precise combination of nutrients that will encourage the flowers to flourish as they grow in waves throughout the summer. The soil has been laid out in such a way that the topography of the moat will change as visitors walk through it. At some points, visitors will be able to look across a field of flowers – at others they’ll feel immersed within the blooms, as the landscape of the moat rises around the paths. To prepare for the seeds being sown, the moat has been divided into 350 4 x 9m oblongs, into which 15 different seed mixes, containing 29 different species, will be sown. Careful consideration has been given to each seed mix – with the species selected even taking into account the shadows cast by the mighty fortress in the moat. It is anticipated that the seed sowing will take a week.
Peat-free Tesco
Tesco is aiming to become the first major UK supermarket to go peat-free on its British-grown bedding plants, in order to significantly lower their carbon footprint. The supermarket giant will take the lead in grocery retail by reducing peat by 95% across its UK bedding plant range – with plans to go completely peat-free in its British bedding plants in 2023. The small amount of residual peat in this year’s range was used by the retailer’s seedling suppliers when germinating the plants. Tesco will work with these suppliers over the coming months, with the goal of eliminating any final traces of peat and becoming 100% peat-free.
The move is significant as Tesco is one of the UK’s largest sellers of bedding plants, with about 40 million plants sold each year. Through this change, Tesco aims to reduce its peat use by nearly 9,000 cubic metres a year. This would reduce the carbon footprint of these products by more than 1,200 tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent emissions) a year – a reduction of 75%. The government is to look closely at the peat issue and there have been calls for a reduction in the harvesting of peat bogs, which has been a natural carbon capture phenonium which is fast becoming an endangered landscape.