Victoria Park rose beds get a face lift

The local community came together on a sunny winters morning to re-plant the two rose beds in Victoria Park.

The rose beds were full of bind weed which the Friends of Victoria Park group have been weeding out for years, but it had got to a point where weeding simply wasn’t enough. As the roses are over 10 years old and coming to the end of their natural life it was decided that this was the time to do something about it.

Digging out the bindweed would mean a lot of hard work and that is where the local businesses came together, Sundog Vehicle Hire provided the digger and man power to dig the 70t of soil out of the beds, Volker Highways took the contaminated soil away and Rivar Sand and Gravel delivered over of 70 ton of beautiful soil and compost blend to replace it with. The 10 deliveries took 2 days because of restricted access but it was well worth it to see the beds ready for planting.

The roses and lavender were delivered on the Friday all ready for the big plant up on Saturday 24^th February. Plenty of volunteers arrived at 10am to help plant up the beds guided by the experts from the Friends of Victoria Park group. Local landscape gardeners had created the planting plan and we were good to go.

Lavenders were planted around the perimeters of the beds and the roses were planted to plan, families, council members and members of the Newbury in Bloom working party all worked hard to plant everything up, Starbucks treated us all to a well earned coffee whilst we admired our work.

Once the Friends of Victoria Park had fleeced the new plants the work was done, now we just have to wait for the flowers to bloom to know whether we planted everything to plan, my daughter is looking forward to visiting the plants we planted together helping to bring Newbury into Bloom this summer.