Friends of Memorial Park Task Days in 2020
Here are details of our task days in 2020.
Nativity Sculptures installed on Market Street!
Adding to the spirit of Christmas in Marple, Friends of Memorial Park finished the year as they started it (in reverse) by installing the Market Street Nativity sculptures this afternoon. This was following a clean-up, refresh and new varnish by metal artist Wayne Chaisty during the autumn. Did you know it was 14 years ago, in 2006 when Wayne made these!
Lockdown 2 set to stop us in our tracks again!
With Lockdown 2 looming tomorrow we decided a final tidy-up of the main flowerbeds and war memorial beds was essential in order to be in the best possible shape for this year's Remembrance, whatever that may be. The main activities were weeding, trimming and tidying the beds, raising a new Remembrance flag and adding fresh wreaths to the railings at the war memorial and the timeline. We also managed a litter-pick, filled in ruts caused by a police vehicle in the park and did a serious and long overdue hack-back of the rhododendrons in one of the shrub beds.
We were joined by council officer Wayne, who did a final picking of stones from the wildflower meadow area too. The council team were also out in force, clearing leaves from the main drive and car park.
It was a lovely day and visitors to the park popped almost £20 in our collection bucket, thank you!
Wall of Remembrance
We would like to say well done to the Marple Poppy Appeal Team, who created a "Wall of Remembrance" on the bowling green fence this year using street poppies annotated with names and dates. It was a very evocative and thought-provoking display, helping to bring home the number of Marple men lost in both World Wars and other conflicts.
Mushroom compost spread on flowerbeds at last!
Better weather today meant that we could at last get back onto the flowerbeds, where we finally managed to distribute the mushroom compost that was delivered too late to go on the beds earlier this year. We also worked on shrub beds by the side of Hollins House and down towards the band room. The usual litter pick was conducted, two Rowan trees donated by a member of the public were planted and the war memorial and noticeboards given a clean too.
We also managed to get onto the wildflower meadow area at last and get some stone-picking done.
Friends of the Park working on the Wildflower Meadow area (Photo: Chris Paul)
Task day brought forward due to weather forecast
The weather forecast for this weekend was far better at the start of the week, so we brought our planned task day forward. However, the park was so wet today that we couldn't work on the grassed areas without doing damage, so we focused on tidying shrub borders that could be accessed from tarmac. This included the Infants Play Area, the border from the library woodland to the Band Room and we also made a start on the one next to Hollins House too.
First Saturday back in the Park!
It was great to notch up our first official Saturday Task Day since 14 March, even though we have to restrict numbers to comply with Government guidance. Park visitors must have been pleased to see us too as they left over £30 in our collection bucket!
We focused mainly on flowerbed maintenance and edging of the main pathway through the park. The latter is one of those things that you don't really notice when it's done but certainly do when it isn't. It looks so much better now.
Infants Play Area fence damage
Park users may have noticed that a large section of the Infants Play Area fence behind the swings has recently gone missing. This is due to it being vandalised by some of our less intelligent visitors to the park.
Wildflower Meadow work continues
The weather is really not playing ball with our preparation works for the wildflower meadow but we continued stripping off dead vegetation to prevent it enriching the soil. The meadow area will be harrowed and stripped a couple more times and it would be great to have some prolonged sunshine to kill off the weeds and make lighter work of stripping them off by hand.
Work was also done on the flowerbeds, the Band Room garden, the Reading Circle borders, litter-picking and a tool store tidy.
Reading Circle Tree Sculpture
We also managed to get the council's Arb Team to cut the bottoms off the last two sections of the broken sculpture from behind the library. Visitors to the park may have noticed that the sculpture has been dismantled after we discovered it broken in July. Unfortunately the base has been decaying from underneath and one section broke off during lock-down, leaving the other two very wobbly. We asked the council to take down the remaining sections and the Arb Team has now cut the rotten bits off all three sections of the sculpture for us so that we can look at the feasibility of resetting them on metal bases.
