Milton Park benefits from our wildflower consultancy service
We pride ourselves on being the UK’s leading wildflower specialists. As a solutions-led business, our experienced consultancy team is well-versed in providing assistance to a wide variety of professionals, organisations and councils within the landscaping and built environment sector.
A recent recipient of our consultancy expertise has been Milton Park.
Milton Park is a dynamic and vibrant science, business and technology park in Oxfordshire, situated between Didcot and Abingdon. Spread across 250 acres, Milton Park is home to 250 companies and 9,000 people.
We are no strangers to the site itself, having supplied Milton Park with 1,520m2 of Meadowscape ProTM Landscape 34 in March 2021 and 60m2 of SuDs Wildflower Turf in July 2021.
At the request of Peter King, Associate Director of Facilities Manager at CBRE (Milton Park), working with landscape maintenance provider, Nurture Landscapes, Wildflower Turf Ltd was asked to examine a number of wildflower-led areas and provide expertise in order to:
- Identify direct seeded areas that may require remedial work.
- Consider the long-term challenges faced by specific areas; shade (trees and buildings), moisture (soil type & irrigation), wear (foot traffic) and provide solutions to alleviate these challenges.
- Review the current wildflower maintenance regime and timings to ensure long term success
- Identify new and/or alternative locations for wildflowers at the Park.
Alongside these four core objectives, our consultants also had to take into consideration the public space design of Milton Park’s wildflower habitat alongside expansion plans while ensuring that the Park’s wildflower areas remain fit-for-purpose over time.
Our team, led by our Managing Director and Lead Consultant, James Hewetson-Brown, conducted a site visit to Milton Park in September 2022.
In total we examined eight distinct areas within the Park including planting a SuDs lagoon, assessing heavily shaded areas, improving areas of meadow where grass was dominating with the aim of increasing species diversity and areas of annual seed planting.
Following our site visit and consultation, our considered and detailed recommendations have assisted Milton Park to remedy and improve the performance of their wildflower spaces and better plan for the future.
Our next blog will be an in-depth interview with Milton Park’s Associate Director of Facilities, Peter King – do keep an eye out for this!
In the meantime, please contact us (wildflower@wildflowerturf.co.uk) to learn more about the way in which our Consultancy and Research Support Packages can help you to mitigate risk and improve your wildflower management.