Fen Ditton Gallery donates £1,500 to support Plantlife Road Verge's Campaign
Road Verge campaign manager, Kate Petty, gives an update on the progress of the project and how the money donated will support their work.
Fen Ditton Gallery is delighted to welcome 2021 with the donation of £1,500 to the Plantlife charity’s, Road Verges project, from funds raised from our Plantlife exhibitions – both on and offline – in Summer/Autumn 2020. Many thanks to all our artists and supporters who have made this possible: you can read more about the artists, the gallery and the exhibition: here.
The challenges of the 2020 Covid-generated lockdowns in the UK meant normal gallery activities were somewhat curtailed but these were offset by an unexpected benefit to our plans for a fundraising exhibition on this subject. Covid curfews meant that from March 2020 many of us in the UK began routines of modest, daily walks close to home during one of the most beautiful Springs on record. Instagram was suddenly alive with pictures of plants, flowers, trees and insects seen on these walks, many thriving on often overlooked spaces such as roadsides and hedgerows: the very areas that have been the focus of the Road Verges project since 2013.
Installation image of Plantlife exhibition at Fen Ditton Gallery, October 2020
Fen Ditton’s Plantlife fundraising exhibition therefore became timely in an unexpected way. Although we had to move the original exhibition online, this new awareness of the world of plants helped create a contemporary context for the show. Good sales from the outset continued to build until we were able to open the gallery doors with a more comprehensive show in the autumn. Works that proved particularly popular were rare and fine engraved glassworks by London artist Katharine Coleman; brilliantly coloured engraved and sandblasted glass bowls by Yorkshire duo Studio Gillies Jones; woven willow sculptures by Lizzie Farey; detailed woodengravings by master engraver Andy English and the beautiful abstract drawings by Frances Priest from her series ‘Patterns of Flora’. We were also able to show a magnificent early Quilt work by Pauline Burbidge, an artist who is the subject of major museum touring show in 2022.
We would like to thank Jules Armour, Kate Petty and all their colleagues at Plantlife for their vital work. It has been a pleasure to connect art and nature again in this way.
Update from Plantlife:
Buttercup Vase and Rondle by Studio Gillies Jones, exhibited in Plantlife Exhibition at Fen Ditton Gallery, June 2020
At the end of last year, Suffolk County Council announced investment in the natural environmental, with £228,000 being invested in projects to protect and enhance biodiversity in the county, including improving road verges for wildlife. More wildlife-friendly management techniques will be trialed using new equipment, and new partnerships with landowners and parishes will be developed, as well as an expansion of the Roadside Nature Reserve network. If you’re based in Suffolk and want to find out more, click here.
There’s good news from Cambridgeshire too. Cambridge City Council are working to adopt more and more of Plantlife guidance as standard on their verges and will soon be trialing cut-and-collect machinery to remove grass cuttings from verges. The Street Scene team are also working with On the Verge Cambridge, the local volunteer group who are working to improve biodiversity across the city. Find out more about On the Verge here.
Work is also ongoing at the County Council level in Cambridgeshire to review grass cutting regimes, and we were pleased to join a meeting a few months ago, along with other experts, to share advice with the county council and contractors on wildflower-friendly management. Hopefully there are positive developments in the work, and we’ll share any further news with you when we have it.
The flower of Cambridgeshire - Limited edition prints of Jonathan Buckley’s Pasqueflower sold in support of Plantlife Charity’s Road Verges Project
There are challenges in implementing guidelines all at once but it’s great to see that there’s a positive direction of travel and that councils are engaging with our guidelines. And on that note, we wanted to say a big thank you to Fen Ditton Gallery near Cambridge for their recent donation to the Road Verge Campaign. Their £1,500 donation was raised from their Plantlife exhibition, held in the gallery and online during summer and autumn last year. Each year the gallery chooses an environmental charity as beneficiary of their fundraising for the year, and we were delighted to have been selected. An element of this was the production of a limited edition Pasqueflower (the County Flower of Cambridgeshire) print by the acclaimed photographer Jonathan Buckley, which can be purchased here.
Huge thanks to the gallery and all the artists and supporters who made this possible, especially as restrictions pushed the exhibition twice to online only. As part of their support, the gallery encouraged customers to sign the Road Verge Petition and contact their local councils to make them aware of the Campaign. The whole Plantlife team are very grateful, and this donation will help support our work to encourage wildlife-friendly road verge management of verges across Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and further afield too.
Support the Road Verge’s Project:
Donate to Road Verge appeal here
Sign Road Verge Campaign petition at plantlife.love-wildflowers.org.uk/roadvergecampaign