Really Wild Fridays

This summer the Education and Community Team have been let loose in RobinHill every Friday, leading the Really Wild Friday events at Robin Hill. Robin Hill is a very poular tourist attraction set in 88 acres of beautiful Island woodland, and we laid on a host of fun and free activities throughout the day. The most popular activity was a Wilderness Survival session at the gipsy camp in the woods for all budding Ray Mears. We provided tarpaulins and string for family groups to create their own bivouacs using the natural materials found in the woods. Families


threw themselves into this activity with gusto, and over the summer we saw some brilliant and innovative structures being created. After finishing their shelters Danny held a fire lighting workshop, demonstrating different ways of lighting fire without using matches. Each family group was then given a fire lighting kit to try and get their own fire going. Groups with successful fires were rewarded with a round of marshmallows to toast.

We also ran "hands-on with nature" arts and crafts down at the Really Wild Stage, making magic woodland wands, dream catchers and paper kites, using a mixture of natural, recycled and scrap store materials.

Isle of Wight County Show

Well, the first day of the 2007 County Show is over. We very nearly didn't make it into the show as we had been allocated an outside plot for some reason, and as you can see our display wouldn't work too well outside, but fortunately space was found for us in the food tent (yum yum) making our Food Trail leaflets and postcards our most relevant publications (the picture shows Rebekah hard at work behind the stand during a quiet spell).


We tried out a "listening post" idea, with some of Ian's audio tours playing back over headphones - not as widely used as I hoped but Rosie seemed to like it! Shame really, because the tracks being played make great listening (all are included in our Friends of Nature membership packs) so I might try speakers tomorrow and inflict Ian on everyone!

Our free seed give away was popular - if you want to join in catch us on Sunday (12th) at the County Show or in September at the Wolverton Garden Fair in September. We also hope to make seeds available via the Gift to Nature website in the near future.

Fancy an Oyster?

We're doing quite a bit of botanical and other ecological survey work at the moment through one of our trading subsidiaries - Arc (this is how we fund parts of our organization and work). Amongst the many other interesting things to spring up on a particular bit of old and abandoned arable farmland currently awaiting development were dozens of plants of this beautiful thing: Tragopogon porrifolius or Salsify. It's just a big dandelion in many ways but with striking purple flowers that open and close during the course of the day. It's a naturalized Mediterranean species and widely cultivated and eaten as a delicacy elsewhere. It's also called the Oysterplant because the root apparently has just that taste. These scrawny feral ones wouldn't taste much of anything I shouldn't think, but the big fat pampered ones have fleshy white roots that can be prepared and cooked in all manner of ways in all manner of dishes. It is also said to ' splendidly deosbtruent ' (a word that means exactly what you think it means) so don't say I didn't warn you.

Big Fat Orchids

It's a good time to look for Bee Orchids: lovely chunky glossy rosettes in the grass, like spring-greens (don't eat them, they're much nicer as flowers). Some will be 'blind' (i.e no flower) but many will put on the full display in a 2 or 3 months, tricking those gullible bees into pollinating them. Actually, that's not really true up in these northern climes - they're pretty much all self-pollinators. Mysterious things, like so many of the world's orchids; some years you might find none, the next hundreds: unpredictable and fickle, aloof and elegant, a bit pointlessly decorative - truly the supermodels of the plant kingdom. This one is in a patch of about 50 on a little roadside lawn in Freshwater.