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Gardening for Health and Wellness
Gardening is a great way to feel good and help your neighbours feel good too. The physical activity involved in gardening makes your heart beat a little faster. You see bright flowers, smell their perfumes and hear birds singing and bees buzzing. You notice more nature around you. You start to feel more alive.
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Filling public spaces with greenery creates small sanctuaries for people and stepping stones for wildlife. Our streets and estates turn into green corridors which are pleasant for us and animals to move about in. When we walk, cycle and spend time with nature we feel healthier, happier and calmer.
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There are many ways to create gardens and green spaces in Kings Park that help nature, yourself and your community. But knowing what's best to do can be difficult. Talking with local people like you who want to garden for wildlife is a good place to start.
Make your street greener
You can garden with neighbours to make your street look beautiful and create little wildlife havens. You can give your front garden a nature make-over, plant up a tree pit, or scatter wildflower seeds in pavement cracks and margins. You can let native plants like dandelions grow naturally to provide nectar and pollen for butterflies, bees and other pollinators.
Knocking down a front wall on Daubeney Road
Seeding a pavement on Trehurst Street
Planting a tree pit on Roding Road
Plant a pavement
Download our free guide on how to seed street flowers.
With expert advice and tips from our postcode gardener.
Planting Flowers for Bees
An easy way to help nature is to plant the flowers that bees love. You see honeybees, bumblebees and other bees flying from spring to autumn, looking for the nectar and pollen that flowers produce.
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Bee populations are plummeting, but many species forage in city gardens. There may be more types of bumblebee in Kings Park than in the Essex countryside. Hackney Council is planting wildflower meadows on our parks - and you can help bees too.
It can be hard to know what flowers are best for bees – many are no good at all. From this page you can download three quick guides to the top bee plants.
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Pollinator-friendly plants are often native ones like dandelions. A wonderful diversity of wildflowers has sprung up in Kings Park since the council stopped spraying herbicide in 2019. Botanist Sophie Leguil later found 62 different kinds of plants growing wild on Daubeney Road. Imagine how much wildlife this supports.
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Gardening with pesticides and herbicides kills the plants and organisms needed to maintain ecological balance. It can lead to the collapse of local populations of birds, hedgehogs and other animals. We cannot build a healthy environment together by poisoning nature. We’d have no flowers without bees and other pollinators. Click below to find good alternatives to using chemicals.
Depaved corner on Daubeney Road and Redwald Road
Pavement plants on Daubeney Road