Objectives:

• Fifteen months after the closure of Landlife and National Wildflower centre in Knowsley, to raise awareness of the opportunity to build upon this charitable legacy, the wildflower fields and harvests and the projects, and a new future with Eden Project.
• To launch new partnerships which have the potential to build on the grass-roots nature of the work and to make wildflowers more of an integral part of urban planning and peri-urban sites, bridging rural divides, with environmental justice.
• To engage people in support of the Northern Flowerhouse and the National Wildflower Centre, charting a forward-looking vision for creative conservation in Merseyside and across the North. Linking Northern and Southern energies.
• To inspire forward-looking thinking in what is meant by green infrastructure.
• To make clear links between environmental action and social justice.
• To celebrate wildflower landscapes and to openly thank those who have stood by the ethics and have supported the past work and charitable purpose of Landlife and the National Wildflower Centre.

The plants in the cracks of the pavements and brickwork begin to lose their fascination with the arrival of those early harbingers of summer –the Swifts (May 9^th)- and thoughts of trips farther afield come centre stage.

I saw several of these tiny (4mm) dung beetles recently at the Green Beach and Devil’s Hole. I thought they were an Aphodius sp. but Gary Hedges sent them to the national dung beetle expert and, despite my dreadful photographs, they came back as Aegialia arenaria. This is fairly common and widespread but largely coastal on sand.  I hadn't noticed them before.

Lunt Meadows is an entirely new 77 ha wetland nature reserve, located along the River Alt floodplain, owned by the Environment Agency, in North Merseyside. It is sited adjacent to an area of raised bank suspected to be the first point of overtopping in a flood event. In July 2010 the River Alt bank did breach in this location and an area of 80 ha was inundated to a maximum depth of 1m. Developing habitats include wet grassland, reedbed, fen and open water. The site is managed primarily for breeding waders and water vole.