The time has come to get down and dirty in the mud, introducing our brand new communal courtyard garden! Get your gloves and shovels at the ready as we bring you that fresh spring feeling, in September! The gorgeous variety of sweet smelling flowers with the back drop of the European Green Capital will keep our Smarts Quarter residents feeling fresh and fruity all year round.

For those of you who don’t know, Bristol is very proud to be the UK’s first cycling city and the ‘Green Capital’ for 2015! With a growing status as the most bike-friendly destination, we feel that our eco-friendly garden will blend in incredibly well. This Green City is plastered with bike routes, open spaces and eco-friendly campaigns – we are sure our home owners will have plenty to do on top of enjoying our specially designed eco garden!

The garden is set to be situated centrally in the grounds of Smarts Quarter so all of our residents will have access to it. It is strategically structured so the landscape will attract beautiful bugs, bees and butterflies as well as being visually pleasing to everyone in Smarts Quarter.

Feeling inspired by what will soon be a beautiful natural space for the Smarts Quarter residents to enjoy, we wanted to share with you our plans for the garden as well as see if we can inspire you to make an eco-friendly garden of your own.

Plans for the Garden

With the assistance of a local gardener the Smarts Quarter communal garden is a wonderful opportunity to create a little oasis of native wildlife in the heart of the city; whilst also giving the residents something beautiful to look at all year round.

What Will be Included in our Little Plant Collection?

So far we have planted an array of wonderful plants including:

• Rowan
• Hazel
• Spindle

All of which are fantastic plants for attracting a wide range of insects and wildlife to the garden, which of course is one of our main aims.

We also plan on adding Elder, Wild Privet, and Dogwoods to the garden whilst additionally sowing a mix of annual and perennial wild flowers. This will allow us to create an amazing lawn meadow that will be changing all year round as different flowers come into bloom throughout the spring and summer months.

We can tell you now; the bees and butterflies are without a doubt going to love spending time in our beautiful garden.

As well as the collection of trees and large shrubs we will also be adding:

• Lily-of-the-Valley
• Winter Aconites
• Snowdrops
• English Bluebells

The addition of these beautiful native shrubs will add a woodland effect to the garden, just like bringing a piece of the countryside into the heart of the city centre.

Over the coming months the garden will become its own mini ecosystem, supporting a whole variety of insects & birds and we cannot wait to see what the garden begins to attract over the next few months and years as the garden begins to mature.

Benefits of Growing Green

Being green is vastly important and is globally popular, but there are so many other reasons why gardening could and should be the hobby for you. Here’s a rundown of why we think everyone should get involved in a bit of gardening:

Personal Benefits

Yes gardening can be a lot of work but it is also very therapeutic. However, the results will talk for themselves and with a little bit of hard graft, design and patience you are sure to be soon enjoying spending some well-deserved time in your beautiful garden. As well discovering your own hidden talents, this community involvement will give everyone the opportunity to share skill sets as well as have fun working together.

Also, just getting out there in the sun can give you so much extra vitamin D, acting as a serious mood boaster. Although with the seemingly endless grey, wet weather we have been having at the moment this may be too much to hope for.

Benefits to Local Wildlife

One singular honeybee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip and one colony of bees consists of 20,000 – 60,000 honeybees. Recent studies show that 9.2% of bees are threatened with extinction and a further 5.2% are likely to be threatened in the future. Altogether, 25% of our nearly 2,000 bumblebee species are threatened in the UK. With this in mind, it is crucial to ensure there is a good supply of pollen to encourage the bees to expand their colonies.

Bees aren’t the only wildlife that will benefit from our garden at Smarts Quarter though. We are planning on having a beautiful supply of ladybugs, butterflies, birds, you name it! And with a little effort and the correct addition of flowers and plants you will be able to attract a number of these insects as well.

Vibrant Views

Unfortunately, not many of us are lucky enough to wake up to a sea view or to the view from a beautiful countryside cottage, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have any view at all. There’ll be nothing more satisfying than opening your curtains every morning to see all your hard work blooming into life. Maybe we can even learn to love the rain!

Will you be Grabbing your Gloves and Shovel?

Are you feeling inspired to create a beautiful eco-friendly garden of your own now? Here at Green Spinnaker we may be the experts when it comes to home construction but when it came to designing our garden we couldn’t have done it without the help from Rachel Butler, the Garden manager, who we know will do a quality job replicating our eco-friendly city for our new homeowners to watch bloom into life right from their door steps.

With Smarts Quarter finally having its final touches added, the doors are soon to be open to our new home owners and we can look forward to our next quality development. Keep an eye out for our latest news or register interest to be kept up to date. Or alternatively, give us a call on 0333 358 3558.