Home Farm Hedges

Miles Duncan, the tenant of Home Farm, Landican

Home Farm, part of the Leverhulme Cheshire Estate, lies in mid Wirral in the centre of the settlement of Landican to the west of the cemetery of the same name. Wirral Countryside Volunteers (WCV) have worked there over the last seven years, laying over 700 metres of hedge with skill and dedication. Arnold Plumley, a Cheshire hedgelaying judge at local and national competitions, said “The hedges laid here are up to competition standard.”

Hedge planters at work

The volunteers ran their 14th, 19th and 20th hedge laying training days on the farm. The 14th training day was the largest training day to date with fifty-eight participants, including twenty students attracted from nearby Woodchurch High School.

WCV planted over six hundred hedgerow whips to form a hedge in the Thingwall Corner Field and planted 200 trees to form a shelterbelt. The volunteers christened the shelterbelt “Rough Shoots Wood” from the field name on the 1847 Landican tithe map. New volunteers were surprised by the effort it took to plant hedgerow whips; five hours of digging is a good workout! When hedgerow planting, lunch was in a neighbour’s garden overlooking the freshly planted hedgerow in the warm January sun.

Hedge planters having a welcome lunch break!

On the 20th hedgelaying training event in February, the volunteers were equally blessed with the weather and laid 168 metres of hedge between the preparation day, the main day itself and a follow up day. This is by far the longest length laid on a training event, reflecting the hedge used and the increased proficiency of the volunteers at hedge laying. It is pleasing to see over the years trainees have developed into trainers.

The WCV have worked in conjunction with Miles Duncan the tenant of Home Farm, Landican.  Miles is so encouraging and greatly appreciates the input of the volunteers and has given generous donations to the volunteers. A professional hedgerow condition survey was made in November 2024 showing ten kilometres of the Landican hedgerows (see below extract showing the areas tackled by the WCV). The report found 3% of hedges were largely gappy (really only self-seeded), 3% in poor condition, 36% in moderate condition and a stunning 58% in good condition.

There were 151 hedgerow trees recorded in the 10-kilometre survey which was also above the survey target of one hundred trees per 10km. When hedge laying the volunteers take the opportunity to keep some trees, mainly crab apples, to promote as future hedgerow trees.  Several kilometres of hedges were planted 10 -15 years ago and the WCV are working to lay them so that the farm looks much more hedged than it had been. Since the report, WCV have planted 150 metres of hedge and laid another 168 metres, putting another 3% of the Home Farm Landican hedges into the good or improving category. 

Map of Home Farm, showing condition of the hedges

Next winter season the volunteers hope to be working on establishing a hedgerow from the former agricultural worker cottages on the sharp bend of Landican Lane, west to Home Farm itself and continue to host further hedge laying training days at Home Farm. Look at the Wirral Countryside Volunteers website in the autumn for further updates.

Paul Loughnane, Secretary, Wirral Countryside Volunteers

30th Anniversary of the Butterfly Park: 2022

2025 is the 30th anniversary of New Ferry Butterfly Park. Over the next few months we will look back at the five years since our 25th anniversary. In January we began with what happened in 2020. Now to 2022...

That year we were able to have an Opening Day to signal the start of our Sunday afternoon openings. We celebrated the 27th open season to the public with the unveiling of the Silver Jubilee entrance gates. Delayed due to the pandemic, these were to celebrate the first 25 years of the park being open to the public. Nearly a thousand guests enjoyed the day at the park amongst the stalls, wildlife and refreshments.

Opening Day visitors

The spectacular gates were opened by Her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside, Mr Mark Blundell, who said “New Ferry faces the many challenges of an inner-city area and this was compounded further by the explosion of March 2017 which destroyed a third of the main precinct. The Butterfly Park is seen as an emblem of hope and re-birth, in fact New Ferry sees itself as a butterfly town, with #Love New Ferry graffiti art by the former Co-op and the “I love New Ferry stickers in the shops” both with a butterfly theme. These spectacular gates will help secure the site and offer the opportunity to provide a welcoming entrance and celebrate the continued success of New Ferry Butterfly Park.”

Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside formally opening the new gates

As well as the fresh comma wings on the gate, another new set of wings seen at the park this week was a Dingy Skipper Butterfly, which had not been seen at the park for over two decades. This was a great endorsement of our habitat management for butterflies at the park. What could be better! We were still spotting new creatures 29 years on from starting to manage the site.

Dingy Skipper : Roy Lowry

The park was then open every Sunday, until Sunday 11th September.

Pond dipping on a Sunday afternoon

That year was the first year that the Wirral Wildlife plant sale continued every Sunday afternoon, thanks to the commitment of Mike Maher, and started raising extra funds.

 It was also a year of some unexpected visitors.

Roy Lowry regularly visits the Butterfly Park with his camera. On the morning of Sunday 12th June he managed to spot and photograph the first Large Skipper butterfly of the season.

Dingy Skipper butterfly

His most unusual photograph was of a fly which struck him as very different. Roy thought he recognized it as a locust blowfly - an African species that has been reported more frequently in recent years as a vagrant in the south of England.  One was seen in Southport in 2020. It did indeed turn out to be a correct identification so this was definitely a first at the Butterfly Park.

Locust blowfly

In July a white letter hairstreak was photographed by Colin Millington. Not seen for nearly two decades, this species was last recorded at the Butterfly Park on 5th July 2003. We rarely see them as they are feeding on the honeydew in the tree canopy (especially on elms). Perhaps levels of honeydew are low, bringing them down to the ground to find nectar in privet and bramble flowers.

White letter hairstreak butterfly

The  Butterfly Park was awarded a Green Flag Community Award for the 10th consecutive year,  the international quality mark for parks and green spaces. 

The Green Flag for 2022 -2023

For two Sundays in September, we were pleased to welcome some giant flower sculptures to New Ferry Butterfly Park. They were loaned from the Eco Art in the Park project, a collaboration between Wirral Environmental Network, artist Alison Bailey Smith, Wirral Unplugged and Wirral Eco Schools programme to highlight the importance of pollinator food plants.

Some of the flower sculptures 

Alison Bailey Smith created nine giant sculptures of plants made using repurposed materials such as garden hose, food packaging, yoga mats, light fittings and toothpaste tubes. The eight wildflowers and one grass depicted by the sculptures are all found in Wirral. 

Three more of the flower sculptures

We held an ‘End of Season’ barbecue for volunteers and, despite the heavy rain that afternoon, 22 people turned up. 

An October workday had 20 volunteers, including some students from Liverpool John Moores University Conservation Society working at the Park. Some apple pressing was expertly organised by John Bateman with 25 litres of apple juice being pressed. Volunteers got a bottle of apple juice to take home.

Pressing the apples to make juice

Bottles of apple juice

We were also able to install two new 1000 litre translucent water butts which have now been covered in a carpet to reduce algal growth. In October the 2000 litres of water collected in them was added to the pond which had suffered from this year’s lack of rain and the water level was raised by 5cm. 

Including that Open Day there were 2,453 visitors to New Ferry Butterfly Park in 2022, which was a good recovery in numbers from the Covid pandemic. There were 16 guided visits: 2 schools, 13 uniformed groups (Beavers, Rainbows etc) and one adult group of refugees, totalling 366 people. The Butterfly Park also welcomed Bebington Photographic Society and Cheshire Bee Group and Dr Hilary Ash gave two plant identification courses. Over the last 19 years an impressive total of 29,794 visitors have visited.

None of these things could be achieved without our volunteers and at the Cheshire Wildlife Trust AGM Butterfly Park volunteer June Mortazavi was presented with the Eric Thurston Award. This is the highest accolade for volunteering given by Cheshire Wildlife Trust. It is given to acknowledge the Trust’s most inspirational and outstanding volunteers

June (centre) receiving her Award

At New Ferry Butterfly Park, she rapidly got involved in practical habitat management and also as a warden, an active committee member and helping host courses and open days. She is also part of the Wirral Wildlife biological recording team She helped the Wirral Wildlife recording team process data and publish a peer reviewed paper on quadrat survey carry out at Thurstaston common for 39 years. That is a lot of data! June also gets out and fights for nature, for example liaising with neighbours over injured hedgehogs found at the New Ferry Butterfly Park. programme in January 2019 and continues to flourish.

As you can see 2022 saw us back up to speed after the restrictions of the previous two years.