As our regular guests will know we always like to have something new to delight our visitors – and this October half term we were delighted to unveil our new Bosinver Habitat Hunt trail.
Thanks to funding from Tevi – an environmental projects programme, this summer we worked with brilliant local designer and author Bill Scolding of Serpentine Design to develop 5 new wildlife interpretation panels to form the basis of a new trail around our site.
We are lucky enough at Bosinver to have a variety of habitats at Bosinver – fields and meadows, a lake and ponds, woodland, hedgerows and banks – all of which we manage carefully to help wildlife thrive here. We wanted to develop a nature focused trail which would help our guests to explore these special areas and get to know a bit more about the variety of animals and plants they might see here.
The Tevi project funding also helped us to build a new garden area on the way down to the lake – we have planted this ‘pollinator garden’ with a variety of plants which provide good nectar and food sources for pollinators – not just bees, but butterflies, moths, flies and beetles. Not only does it look beautiful, the garden was buzzing with activity over summer and a lovely place to stop a while and appreciate nature.
Update summer 2021: the pollinator garden is maturing beautifully with a succession of planting with nectar sources to keep it buzzing throughout the seasons. We have also now installed a sign to highlight the Blue Campaign to encourage people to re-wild their gardens and plant for wildlife.
In addition to the new interpretation boards we also set up some beautiful brass rubbing posts to make the trail fun for children of all ages – we supply the paper and crayon and a quiz sheet and when completed our young guests can claim a nature based prize from reception. The first guest to complete the trail and quiz was young Sophie who told us she had lots of fun doing it and that her favourite brass rubbing was of the hedgehog!
We were delighted to get some feedback from her Mum Felicity too:
“I loved the new heart flower garden. I spent a lot of time looking and getting ideas. I am going to try to re-create a smaller one in our garden. I’ve started companion gardening and we have lots of bee friendly plants. Sophie really enjoyed the grass rubbings and the habitat trail. She really got into it and went off by herself to find out more and read the boards and complete the trail.”
The Tevi project has also kindly funded new bat and bird boxes which we have put up around the farm, a webcam so we can film some of our wildlife and a bat detector and moth trapping kit, all of which we intend to make good use of to show our guests more of the wonderful wildlife we have here at Bosinver.
Hopefully some of our guests might be inspired to make a pollinator garden of their own! Here are some ideas from the Wildlife Trusts for things you can do yourselves to help wildlife at home. If you do, don’t forget to take some photos and drop us an email to let us know at reception@bosinver.co.uk
