The community for users of Preston Park in Brighton, UK
Peter Bourne, Brighton’s premier tree expert, will lead a walk around Preston Park, discussing the amazing trees that can be found in the park. Meet at the Chalet Cafe.
To manage numbers, we would like you to register for this event. If you are bringing children, you do not need to register them as well.
Just a reminder that the deadline for entries to this year’s photo competition is coming up at the end of August.
Don’t forget to submit your entries in time!
As you can see from this picture by Rose Jones, the park is looking lovely at the moment, so you won’t be short of inspiration:
Rose Jones was granted this behind-the-scenes look at the work being carried out on the Preston Twin statue by Elpida and her assistant Alison. Funds are still urgently needed to complete the work – here’s how to donate.
Here are some pictures that Rose took:
Ranger Neil Doyle and CityParks Ranger Volunteers gave a helping hand to Friends of Preston Park volunteers to clear the bindweed and thistles that were chocking the roses in the Rose Garden. We are very grateful for their help as it is a constant challenge to keep on top of the weeds and ensure the Rose Garden looks at its best at all times.
Following on from our successful event in May, those aged 16 and over are warmly invited to join us in the park to create a piece of art using a medium of your choice – pencils, coloured pencils, paint, pastels, ink, collage, mixed media or any other. It will be a great day to meet other people with an artistic temperament and to share experience and knowledge.
Meet for a short briefing near the Chalet Cafe at 10.00 am. Don’t forget to bring all your own art materials. You can then choose any location in the park to create your artwork, being considerate of other park users. Preston Park has many places where you can find interesting subject matter and work directly from life.
Meet back at Chalet Cafe at 13.00 pm to share your work with your colleagues.
Any artwork you create does remain your property but we will ask your consent to take a photograph. We hope to share these online and perhaps in an exhibition in the Park.
A really interesting film about the Preston Park gilded twin …
All of the paintings created at our first Painting in the Park event are now on display at the Chalet Cafe. be sure to take a look!
As part of the Platinum Jubilee Planting Scheme, we have been awarded a grant of £200 from Brighton Hove City Council. We plan to use the funds to help refurbish the Coronation Garden which was originally planted as a sensory garden for blind people. We hope to be able to plant as many sweet-smelling plants, such as jasmine, as we can to honour this legacy, making the garden more inviting to all the community.
Our first Tree-Sure events were a great success with several hundred children scouring the park for trees on its first two days. Congratulations to the team of volunteers who worked to design and run the event.
Here’s a review of the event from Anjoline, in the top left of the picture above:
“My name is Anjoline, I am Canadian and studying in child and youth studies with Professor Sam Frankel and so this programme is all about advocating children’s rights and giving children a voice and what we are doing here is really hearing the voices of the children and getting them involved in activities.
So we are here a group of 8 Canadian students to learn more about your trees here and to work with children locally. The activities here at Preston Park went really well, we had a lot of people coming and they explored the Tree-Sure hunt and learnt more about the trees in their area, all the different types as there is such a vast variety of trees located in this park.
We did activities which are all relevant to the trees, such as slime making with the downy birch, known as the glue tree because it has a very sticky sap. It looks like a birch tree but has sap on the outside. Glue is a very necessary element to slime so we made eco slime. There was also the bug making activity where children got to use pipe cleaners to make some bugs as trees are home to many insects.
We had this huge sheet on which children wrote about what they thought of trees and what they loved about the environment and how Preston Park was important to their well-being and play. My impression of Preston Park is that it is a massive park with so much to offer, each tree is unique and our activity was a very important one to hold in this special place and we are glad we could share with the children our knowledge about the trees.”