From the Ground Up

Just 25 parishes in Cambridgeshire have been chosen to take part in the first stage of a new four-year nature recovery project funded by Cambridge County Council - and Haslingfield is one of them!

It may not seem like it from our lovely village, but Cambridgeshire is one of the least wildlife rich counties in the UK. What’s more, many of our nature sites are marooned in the middle of farmland or cut off from each other by roads and other infrastructure.

To turn this around, Cambridge County Council, in partnership with Natural Cambridgeshire, will support the 25 chosen parishes with advice, expertise and targeted fundraising. Called Nature Recovery from the Ground Up, the project advice will reflect the priorities and science-based action plans set out in the Local Nature Recovery Strategy.

Parishes were chosen because they had active groups in place and a history of caring for nature, which our parish council and many community groups through the years have demonstrated.

There’s much more we can do, however. We’ll be looking at ways to improve and join up our nature spots to create networks for nature – and your garden could be a part of that. We’ll be getting advice on improving biodiversity in the meadow and holding more Bioblitzes, insect ID sessions and more. And we’ll be looking at how we can care for our waterways and ponds more effectively. We will need all sorts of skills and volunteers for these projects, from bakers to Instagram experts, from scythers to people clever with maps, from rakers to people who like to wade in ponds and rivers – get in touch if you would like to take part: hnheco@gmail.com.

The Project

We are running a village project to celebrate and hopefully increase nature and biodiversity in local gardens. Our first step is to try to record all the gardens in our parish which contain nature-friendly elements. We’ve created a short survey to help us find out about the nature-friendly gardening in our community. We are asking for your address (first line & postcode) in order to create a village map showing nature-friendly features. However, results will be reported (apart from the map) in summary form only .

On the map, properties which have reported nature friendly gardening will be “colour-coded” to give us a picture of nature friendly gardening in our Parish.

This project is supported by Cambridgeshire County Council ‘Nature From The Ground Up’ initiative.

* We will only use your contact details (optional), if you choose to provide them, for this project and will not share your personal data with any third parties

To fill in the survey, click HERE.

To view our Data Protection Policy, click here.