Our School Grounds: Providing Food – Borders

Activity 1: Planning Your Pollinator Border

This is a partnership project with: Learning through Landscapes, Buglife, Butterfly Conservation, Field Studies Council, OPAL, University of Stirling, TCV and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust

INTRODUCTION

A pollinator border will be a permanent feature on your patch, so good advance planning is crucial to its success. Before you begin, take some time to visit gardens nearby and look at how others have created their flower borders to get an idea of styles and types of planting. There is a short and simple BBC guide to styles of borders here.

If you already have established borders on your patch, you may wish to revamp them with pollinators in mind. Think about the plants that are already growing in the established border. Are there any you would want to keep and reuse? You can always dig these out, pot them up and then replant them later once you start to create your border in earnest.

MAINTENANCE AND VOLUNTEERING

  • Supervising the planning activity
  • Knowledge exchange – talk to local gardeners and gardening groups
  • Knowledge exchange – visit local gardens to get ideas

SEASONALITY

  • Spring
  • Summer
  • Autumn
  • Winter

This is a partnership project with: Learning through Landscapes, Buglife, Butterfly Conservation, Field Studies Council, OPAL, University of Stirling, TCV and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust

MATERIALS AND EQUIPMENT:

  • Squared paper
  • Pencil and rubber
  • Coloured pencils, crayons or pens
  • Rope, string or old hosepipe
  • Chairs
  • Buckets
  • Tubs

STEPS:

  1. Think about the border you are creating or revamping and work through our Important Things to Remember sheet, thinking through the Physical, Ecological and Practical constraints of the task ahead.
  2. Whether you are making a new border or revamping an old one, work out how big your border is and create an initial plan on squared paper so you can draw it to scale and plan effectively.
  3. Think about what plants you want to include in your border in order to provide lots of food and shelter for our pollinators throughout the year. Established borders may have plants you want to retain, so remember to add these into your plan.
  4. Look up the heights your plants will grow to. You want the bigger plants in the centre or along the back edge so they don’t crowd or shade smaller, lower-growing plants.
  5. Create a mock-up of your planned border using chairs, buckets and tubs to represent different blocks and heights of plants, and move around until you are happy with your design.
  6. Use your colouring pencils and pens to illustrate the blocks of colour in your border so you can get a feel for what it will look like when it is in flower at different times of year.
  7. You have yet to prepare and dig your border, but it is worth thinking about ordering plants and seeds you know you are going to want in the coming year. Head to our Polli:Nation Resources: Sourcing plants and seeds factsheet for more information.

USEFUL LINKS

  • To get ideas on what food you need to provide for your pollinators, head to Polli:Nation Resources: What do our pollinators eat?.
  • Really helpful advice on combining plants, shapes, textures and colours from the BBC’s How to be a Gardener website
  • An introduction to effective colour combinations from The Enduring Gardener
  • If you want to experiment with planning your garden on the computer, here are some suggestions for ten of the best free garden design programmes from The Self-Sufficient Living website.

This is a partnership project with: Learning through Landscapes, Buglife, Butterfly Conservation, Field Studies Council, OPAL, University of Stirling, TCV and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust