Linslade Garden of Remembrance is located off Mentmore Road. It’s enclosed behind a hedge on the south-west corner of Linslade Memorial Playing Fields.
In November 2013, Leighton Linslade Town Council gave a local resident, Dawn Love, permission to create a permaculture garden that also reflected the theme of remembrance in the northern ‘arm’ of the garden.
The garden was started in the late 1940s when Linslade war memorial had to be moved from its original site (more details here). Originally the garden consisted mainly of lawns, with paved paths lined with narrow flower borders filled with bedding plants – very beautiful, but very labour-intensive. During the 1980s the flower beds were turfed over.
Starting work on the site
The turf was dug out by members of South Bedfordshire Friends of the Earth with the help of other local residents, allotment-holders from the Wyngates allotments, and volunteers from Spencer Rail, who were building the lifts at the station at the time. The work started in December 2013 and was completed by April 2014. We were also helped by the nearby preschool, Mentmore Road Under Fives, who still plant vegetables and flowers and particularly like digging the earth on their own bed.
We’ve had very welcome support from local retailers including Nature’s Harvest and Dillamores Furnishers, and the Friends of Tiddenfoot have been very supportive of the project. At first, the various beds were planted with cornfield annuals, herbs, vegetables for the community, and some garden flowers, particularly roses and other shrubs.
Updating the planting scheme
The site has evolved over the years as we gained more experience. It became difficult to maintain the gardens to the standard needed for a garden of remembrance, while encouraging bee-magnet flowers such as clover and self-heal, which can be very invasive.
In 2015 a team of local residents joined our members to look after the garden. We added many bee-friendly garden flowers in the hope we’d encourage other people to plant them too, which would widen the area of bee-friendly planting.
We try to make sure there are flowers available to bees all year round, even in January (red deadnettle and perennial wallflowers). We don’t use pesticides and use a heat-based weed wand to clear weeds from the adjacent paths, which keeps them tidier, too.
The garden has been known by a few different names since its inception (most local residents have called it Linslade Memorial Gardens for the last few decades) but on 27 January 2020 the Town Council approved a motion to revert to its original name, Linslade Garden of Remembrance.
There’s a blog on the Linslade Garden of Remembrance website which is updated roughly every month. We use it to answer questions we’ve been asked while working there, and to document our progress.
Keep an eye on our events page for more information about upcoming work parties or awareness days.