Jaguar Land Rover project II

Following on from our previous post on the Jaguar Land Rover project, the completed Bird-hide and wildlife area (so kindly constructed for us by JLR's team of volunteers) was officially opened on 24^th July 2014.

The honours were undertaken by Joe McNamara, Chair of the Group and Lean Manufacturing Manager at Jaguar Land Rover, who followed up the proceedings with an additional financial donation for bird-feeder seed. There will be some very heavy birds flying around the area soon as we rapidly develop into an avian fine-dining establishment!

Joe added his voice to the gratitude that we all felt for the dedicated JLR volunteer team's efforts to enhance the quality of life in our local community.

Additional thanks must also go to Signarama for donating the lovely full colour wildlife guides dotted about the area. These fantastic efforts and achievements will be put to good use both for our visitor and educational programmes.

Joe McNamara and some of the JLR Volunteers pictured by our new Bird-hide 
presenting members of the CBHG team with bird feed-fund finance!

The exterior of our fantastic new Bird-hide.

You will be able to spot them soon!

The birdie restaurant as viewed through a slot in our new hide.

Our newly planted wildlife garden-area.

...and again!

Whilst all the was fuss was going on, our Moorhens remained signally unimpressed!

 
Text by Graham High and photographs by Yvonne and Graham High - 2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Jaguar Land Rover project

Jaguar Land Rover chose the Garden for their Business in the Community project, and spent 5 days at the Garden to complete a new Bird Viewing Hide and wildlife friendly area.  The area selected is between the North Pond and the recently restored Mirror Pond.  They brought a team of 17 enthusiastic employees and two excellent team leaders.

The site they worked on was initially overgrown with tall herbs and brash, which they strimmed  and tidied up efficiently.  The strimming work carried on all week in other areas of the Garden. The teams also stacked the brash to make new habitat piles in the area.  One of the advantages of the site chosen, is that there is a large holly hedge nearby, which provides a refuge for the small woodland birds to retreat to after feeding.

Whilst they were waiting for the materials for the bird viewing hides to be ordered, the team kindly took on a wide range of other jobs in the Garden, which helped us immensely.  These included a major project in the Batty Langley Kitchen Garden, edging and weeding round borders, and planting out late summer vegetables such as squashes, and pumpkins.  They also lifted three borders of box hedging in the Lower Wilderness area, as part of our programme to improve access to viewing the snowdrop & hellebore collection in the deciduous borders, and helped to prepare the Dahlia border in the Best Garden.  On the final day the bird hides were put in place, complete with feeders,  and a new compost viewing area with a Perspex screen was constructed.  This should help children and families to observe the insects, invertebrates, amphibians and small mammals, which will hopefully start to use this habitat in the future.



 Bird viewing Hide, showing the bird viewing windows,

set at different heights, for adults, children & disabled visitors

New compost viewing habitat, with Perspex screen

for youngsters and visitors to observe the wildlife making

use of these areas in the Garden

The Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens Trust is very grateful to Jaguar Land Rover for all the excellent  work carried out to achieve this  project, which will in time become a great new feature in the Garden, as the birds & wildlife start to make use of this habitat and the feeding stations.

We also appreciated all the additional work in the Garden which the team carried out, throughout their project at the Garden.

Chris Hitchcock

Head Gardener