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Friends of Daisy Farm Park, Billesley.
Plant For Life - Urban Code
New rules for greener urban space
Plants are known to make our lives healthier and our environment less polluted. We need to give them maximum respect and protection. Public and private sector investment in communal green spaces could be better protected if residential areas were informally policed through an urban equivalent of the ‘Country Code’ - according to a campaign to encourage smarter investment in communal planting.
Research* from PlantforLife shows that three quarters of Britons have witnessed some form of ‘green vandalism’ in their area. 60% of Britons would also support a set of rules to help protect greenery in urban environments as much as in the countryside. As a result, PlantforLife has teamed up with Chris Baines, one of the UK's leading environmental campaigners to create an ‘Urban Code’.
In place of countryside rules about fastening gates, keeping dogs under control and guarding against risk of fire, the PlantforLife ‘Urban Code’ tackles the scourges of city living - littering and plant vandalism. PlantforLife hopes to encourage Local Authorities to consider implementation of its ‘Urban Code’ at a local level.
PlantforLife ‘Urban Code’
- Respect and protect civic planting, particularly areas where there are young trees
- Allow nature to provide colour in public spaces, not graffiti
- Encourage birds in your garden but respect instructions to avoid feeding pigeons in public places
- Avoid parking on grass verges and taking short-cuts across grassed or planted areas–
- Always use litter bins or take your litter home
- Clean up after your dog
- Always dispose of unwanted white goods, furniture and other large household items at the appropriate local refuse facilities and not in the landscape
- Don’t pick or damage flowers in public spaces – they are for everybody to enjoy
- Adopt local planting and water young trees in dry weather
- Enjoy the minimum 20 minutes recommended daily allowance (RDA) of exposure to plants and greenery as a simple way of reducing stress and improving health and wellbeing
The research revealed that common acts of ‘green vandalism’ are:
- snapped tree saplings - 73%
- trampled plant life - 72%
- graffiti etched on tree trunks - 63%
- trampled grassy areas - 49%
- beheaded flowers - 47%
The PlantforLife ‘Urban Code’ coincides with the launch of a new range of free booklets for policy makers, investors, architects, planners, landscapers and specifiers in both the public and private sector. The booklets include information from a wide range of published scientific studies on the benefits of plants and green spaces, highlighting the environmental, health, social and economic benefits of planting on a wider scale.
They have been written by Chris Baines, with input from David Mote, formerly of the House Builders Federation; Chris Griffin, editor of editor of planning and regeneration magazine ‘Axis’; Tom la Dell, landscape architect and Tony Hawkhead CBE, Chief Executive of Groundwork. Technical research and supporting facts and figures were provided by the University of Reading. Visit the Plants Matter section of the site for more information.
Together with plant suggestions, the materials also offer PlantforLife resources for a more common-sense, forward-thinking approach to planting strategies – increasing greenery and getting the right plants in the right place.
The ‘Urban Code’ is a response to the high levels of plant damage and vandalism in urban areas and the small pockets of society who fail to acknowledge their personal responsibility to reduce or prevent it. By targeting the public with a set of informal guidelines and providing planners and specifiers with advice on how they can invest their planting budgets more efficiently, hopefully the PlantforLife campaign will prompt the improvement of urban areas as cleaner, greener and more pleasant places to live.
Chris Baines, who helped to devise the Code and wrote much of the PlantforLife education believes it makes great sense to encourage the people who make the decisions about urban green spaces as well as the people that can enjoy the benefits. We all need to play a part in creating and protecting communal green spaces and any campaign that can help protect today’s environment and improve it for the future should be suported.
Chris Baines trained as a horticulturist and a landscape architect, and spent his early career in public parks, the commercial nursery and contracting industries and in postgraduate teaching. For 20 years he has worked as an independent adviser to industry and to central and local government. Chris is regarded as one of the UK’s leading environmentalists and is a national vice president of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, a patron of the Landscape Design Trust, president of the Thames Estuary Partnership and the Association for Environment-conscious Building (AECB) and an honorary fellow of the Institute of Leisure and Amenity Management (ILAM). He works closely with major companies in the UK construction, minerals, energy and water industries and has judged the Green Leaf Housing Awards since 1986. He was a Trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund for six years and is now a member of the HLF expert panel.
For more information www.plantforlife.info.