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We had our first meeting of 2025 on the 26th January. A really detailed discussion with some great news! The biggest was that our plans for a second pond have been approved by the Council and will be fully funded, and our work on a tree walk leaflet has come on leaps and bounds. Our next meeting will be in mid-late March. Hope to see you there! Please find the full minutes below: 
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We had our last Friends Meeting of the year on the 23rd November. A hot topic was the Council's announcement of £1million investment for wildlife friendly spaces - hopefully we can benefit from some of the funding! Other topics include our ongoing work on:
The next meeting with be in late January 2025 (tbc) Please find minutes below:
 The Friends have now completed the work on the meadow patches for this Summer! This is one of our biggest jobs of the year and it isn't easy work! A huge thank you to our small but extremely dedicated group of volunteers who came out to remove the clippings from the patches over 4 sessions, in rain or shine. Special thanks go to Val and Dylan, who really champion these areas and put the most work in of anyone! The patches are around the traffic lights at the intersection of Wellington Hill and Kellaway Avenue, with the largest next to Horfield Parish Church. As the wildflowers grow back, go take a look at their progress over the coming months! Dylan Peters, our resident ecologist, has kindly written a great piece below about the importance of the meadow patches and the work that we're carrying out in more detail. Thank you, Dylan!  Meadows on Horfield Common The creation of new meadows is an exciting, fascinating, and in the long run, very rewarding process. The method in which most meadows are created today is unfortunately rarely done so in consideration and understanding of how meadows and their ecosystem actually work. Often turf is removed or the ground made bare and seeds of various sorts are sown. Annual ornamental mixes with useless non-native's such as California Poppies, Phacelia and the likes (bold, bright and colourful) - are often promoted as 'pollinator friendly' when they are anything but. At best they may attract a few Honey Bees and Hoverflies. They are designed to bring a burst of short-term colour and they give the wrong impression to the public as to what a meadow should look like. Really they are just an extension of cultivating the wild and a 'green-wash'. Perennial mixes on the other hand are widely used in so-called 'conservation' and 'rewilding projects' and for 'offsetting biodiversity loss' from new developments - the situations where it is really important to get things right! These mixes nearly always contain dodgy non-native and agricultural variants of wildflowers and even when they don't, they still threaten the existing local wild and unique plant populations, by mingling and spoiling the local gene pool with seeds which may have originated from Cornwall, Scotland or far worse - from outside of the UK. Not only is sowing seeds potentially hugely destructive but it is also boring and cheating. What creates a proper meadow is down to long-term management, observation and patience. Here on Horfield Common we are setting out to achieve just that by making use of the least-used land - the margins, corners and areas not regularly used for football, picnics and other social activities but at the same time integrating them so they are not out of sight and so we create a mosaic effect, which makes the overall look of Horfield Common more varied and not just a boring desert of short grass. With different areas managed on different cutting regimes - some cut once a year, others on alternating years, every few years and some not at all, we can promote different floral compositions (habitats) which in turn cater for a different set of wildlife and each broadening the scope of Horfield Common's overall biodiversity. The initial stage is to leave areas uncut for a period which allows us to see what already exists. This is a really important and interesting process as it tells us information about the land you couldn't possibly know when it was just short grass; and invertebrate life very quickly moves in. Grasshoppers, spiders, moths, butterflies, craneflies and tiny parasitic wasps, you name it! Ant hills also appear which is a really good sign as ants are essential in the health of meadows and dispersing seeds, many of which are brought back to the nest where they inevitably reach a perfect seed medium of loose friable sun-warmed soil in which to germinate. When it comes to cutting sites, on some of them, we focus our attention on raking up the hay and spreading it out onto areas which remain regularly cut so that it rots down quickly. It is also a very important stage in improving species-richness (and therefore the biodiversity of meadows) as the process opens up the ground, letting in more light and exposing bare patches for new plants to naturally colonise as well as reducing nutrient levels so that more dominant species are kept in check and do not outcompete the more sensitive plants. The disturbance also awakens already present seeds in the soil which may have been lying dormant for a very long time. In some sites we are planning on making more use of this incredible process by scarifying and turning over the soil. By awakening even more of these tiny biological time capsules... we can essentially bring back plants (which have gone locally extinct) from the dead! Currently we have to do everything manually but hopefully in the future we can have some mechanical work with proper hay collectors to do this back-breaking (but very rewarding) work for us and over time we can make Horfield Common a much better place for wildlife and people.  Wingless parasitic Gelis wasp, found on the meadow patch. Photo credit: Dylan Peters Please find attached the Minutes from the Friends September Meeting. There have been one or two updates in the previous week, which have been added to the Minutes. Next Friends Meeting Confirmed for Saturday 5th October, 2-4pm, The Garden Room at The Ardagh. Hope to see you there! Meeting with Mary O'Connell We had a meeting with our new Parks contact, Mary O'Connell, on Wednesday 11th September, to say hello and discuss various points around the Common (more detail in Minutes). Cut-and-collect machine / Cutting map Unfortunately, the funding has fallen through for the machine, so we will have to rake the meadow areas by hand again. Val and Lucy are working on getting things in place for this. Mary O'Connell has confirmed a date in the week of 23rd September - exact date tbc. (Anyone interested in helping with the physical work of the raking of the hay, please let us know!) She will be onsite with the grass cutter, so the cuts are right. She says we can then do the same again in spring. Second pond Dylan has now sent plans to Mary O'Connell, so we can hear her thoughts when she's back from annual leave. Please find Minutes below:
Due to ongoing commitments with our co-ordinator, Lucy, the communications for the Friends group were a little behind the past two months - apologies for an inconvenience this caused. There was a Friends meeting on the 23rd June (a more informal meeting) and one on the 21st July - please find the minutes for both below.  Our meeting was meant to be a split meeting, but there was much to discuss, so the Management Plan has been taken up by our emerging wildlife focus group! If you would like to get involved in this sub-group, which has more of a focus on the wildlife-side of the FOHC, please email us at [email protected]. General points included:
Please find the Minutes below:
 Thank you to Friend Seekan Hui who has made a beautiful new poster for FOHC! This is a general poster, which we'll be distributing to noticeboards outside of the Common (where we can't easily update them each month). If you would like to help spread the word about the FOHC, please do download a copy below and share with your networks, or email us at [email protected] for print copies. We'd love to welcome new Friends!
 What?
Friends have worked with the Council and placed the above signs around the Common - you will have likely have spotted them! These are to help guide the Council's mowers as we refresh the cutting schedule for the grass and to make sure the right areas get cut and the right areas are left alone. Why? We're focusing on protecting areas of long grass and wildflower meadow, which in recent years have been accidentally mown. These are mostly areas around the fringes, which won't obstruct ball games/picnics etc. and leave pretty much the same space for recreational use as there currently is. Please find a map produced by our local ecologist here, which is what we're aiming for at the moment: https://wildbristol.uk/pages/horfield-common-wildlife-management-plan/ We've been working with the Council and a local ecologist in order to update the cutting schedule of the Common, which hasn't been amended since at least 2017. We held a consultation in December: https://fohorfieldcommon.weebly.com/whats-on/horfield-common-cutting-map-refresh This is very much a work in progress, so if you would like to get involved, I'd recommend attending our Friends meetings - these are usually every 6-8 weeks and details can be found on the What's On page. So much to celebrate that's happened at the Common in the last two months, we haven't had time to update! Your Park Volunteer Awards Dylan Peters, who is our local ecologist and champion of the Common's wildlife, and Lucy Haslam, FOHC's Co-Ordinator, were nominated for Your Park Volunteer Awards - with Dylan winning Young Adult Volunteer of the Year! Well done, Dylan - so very much deserved for all your hard work!! (Image from Your Park and more info can be found here at Your Park's site)  Horfield Common Wildlife Pond The pond is flourishing! As of April, we're seeing frogspawn, newts and even the calls of toads, so it's wonderful to see that the work restoring the pond has been so successful already! Hedgelaying Joe Aslett and his team, from Parks, have been really kind in undertaking the hedgelaying of the bush to the right of the pond. This lets in more light to the pond, as well as creating a more dense hedge that is great for wildlife. Thank you to them for supporting us with your time, skills and support with extra saplings! We had previously planned for this to be a volunteer activity but due to time constraints and snow, we had to plunge ahead. More hedgelaying of other areas will be arranged in future instead. Sign We have put up a rope and sign to please stay off the mud banks for now, to allow them to recover further.  Bulb planting from October It's wonderful to see the daffodil bulbs we planted at the Common, by the car park and the traffic lights, bursting out! Not quite as many in full bloom as you'd like, but some we planted in 2022 were similar and took a year to settle and show their colours. A promising start and thanks to everyone who joined in to plant them last year!    On Sunday, 17th March, local historian Andy Buchan kindly led another fully booked Horfield History Walk! Thank you to everyone for attending and their interest! From the use of the area as Common land, to the splitting of Gloucester Road, through to the barracks and air raid shelters of WW2, we were treated to a jam-packed overview of Horfield Common! Andy's group 'Bishopston, Horfield & Ashley Down Local History Society' meets on the third Tuesday of every month and always welcomes new members! Find further details of where they meet and the provisional 2024 program at their website: https://bishopstonhistorysociety.wordpress.com/ Thank you so much to Andy, for volunteering his time and energy for the walk! If you'd like to attend similar events in future, be sure to email [email protected] to join our mailing list.  |
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