Emerging From Hibernation at the Butterfly Park

Mayor Cllr Geoffrey Watt and Mayoress Mrs Anne Watt with members of NFBP committee -

Paul Loughnane (Secretary), Hilary Ash (Conservation Officer) and Howard Gibson (Treasurer).

Photo: Carole Ross.

New Ferry Butterfly Park has recently received a Liverpool Echo Community Impact Award, appropriately sponsored by Merseyrail and Arriva who both provide public transport services to the Park. The Park’s 10th Opening Day event, which marks the start of the season, was attended by Mayor Cllr Geoffrey Watt and Mayoress Mrs Anne Watt , who opened the event and launched an new art trail leaflet. As a thank you for being guests of honour they were presented with matching ‘#loveNewFerry’ mugs decorated with the imaginary butterfly featured as an excellent piece of graffiti art on a wall in New Ferry district centre. The Butterfly Park’s impact over the last 24 years has spread out to the rest of New Ferry which sees itself as a Butterfly Town. After quarter of an hour the Mayor and Mayoress had to depart to another engagement but promised like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator, that they would ‘be back’.

“Art has had a great role in the park adding interest to the park, especially on inclement days, when no butterflies are flying. The art works encourage you to look a bit more closely at the nature around you at the park. This leaflet brings the collection of art works started in 2006 by Vicky Hose and most recently the Welcome Board in 2018 by Pam Sullivan together giving them some unity. We are grateful to Jo Patterson of Bebington for her brilliant design” explained Paul Loughnane, the Park’s secretary.

Mayor and Mayoress with Jo Patterson, who designed the new Art Trail leaflet, and James (and their daughter).

Photo: Hilary Ash.

Merseyrail put up their own poster about the Community Impact Award adjacent to the gates of the park and put up a temporary pedestrian barrier to separate cars and pedestrians on the access road to the park making it safer. “We were delighted with the support from Merseyrail. 1,000 people had a very good day out in decent weather, enjoying flowers and a few real butterflies. We reckon about a tenth arrived by train - a figure we should try to increase,” commented Hilary Ash, Conservation Officer.

We had nearly 40 self-motivated and self-organised experienced volunteers on the day who each knew their role and made such a large event run smoothly. It was a most successful opening day event in terms of fundraising especially important as we look to do something special for the 25th year of the park being open to the public in 2020. John McCaw was so pleased with his cache of spiders caught at the Park he asked if we could rename the place ‘New Ferry Spider Park’.

The Mayor and Mayoress returned as promised and stayed for over two hours enjoying the various attractions: tombola, homemade cakes, making plant pictures, identifying spiders, pedal powered smoothies, potting up plants, bee display and honey from the park, butterfly crafts and maypole dancing. The Mayoress was particularly interested in the wonderful Wirral Wildlife plant stall and a herb garden planter was readily made up for her by the apply named botanist, Barbara Greenwood.