Holbeck

We walked to Elland Road for our Tourmaker Training this morning through Holbeck, a part of Leeds unfamiliar to us. In the shadow of a tower block was this beautiful wildflower meadow. It took me back to a documentary I watched last year about a woman who was trying to change mind sets about the way our public spaces are 'grown'. She believed that wildflower planting such as this, as well as being great for wildlife, can also affect behaviour. She developed projects on housing estates with the help of their communities. Her critics said that people would not respect the planting but in actuality the opposite happened. She also encouraged rural communities to reconsider their pristine village greens and plant swathes of meadow flowers along their edges to encourage insects and bees. A third programme looked at how she planted the central reservations of motorways where the traffic acted as a wind flume for seed dispersal.

Another view of the meadow is here!