Last year, volunteer station adopters added over 1,000 square metres to the areas set aside for gardens and wildlife areas at Greater Anglia stations.
There are now 66 stations on Greater Anglia’s network that have station gardens, and together they cover an area of more than 10,000 square metres.
Among the stations where volunteers created new areas of garden last year are Alresford, Attleborough, Audley End, Battlesbridge, Brundall, Bures, Chappel and Wakes Colne, Diss, Great Bentley, Haddiscoe, Hockley, Ingatestone, Melton, North Fambridge, Oulton Broad North, Rayleigh, Salhouse, South Woodham Ferrers, Southminster, Whittlesford Parkway, and Wymondham.

Besides making the stations more attractive, welcoming, and contributing to human wellbeing, each garden provides a vital habitat for local wildlife and food for pollinators such as bees and butterflies.
As well as creating station gardens, volunteers added more flower planters to platforms, hanging baskets, and window boxes at stations across Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, and Hertfordshire.
To encourage pollinators, they also installed more bee refuges, insect houses, and bird boxes.

Some gardens have been developed over many years and are now havens for local wildlife populations.
This accords with the views of ecologists that railways are a ‘green corridor’ provides a sanctuary for many different kinds of flora and fauna.
Over 200 different species of creatures have been reported visiting stations, including many different types of birds, butterflies, bees, slow worms, bats, toads, foxes, and deer.
Greater Anglia has partnered with the region’s wildlife trusts to recognise formally volunteers’ efforts to make stations more wildlife friendly.
‘Wildlife Friendly Station’ accreditation has been awarded to 31 stations with more to follow.
To celebrate Greater Anglia’s station gardens, last year the Essex and South Suffolk Community Rail Partnership held ‘Open Garden’ events that allowed the public to visit the stations gardens and see for themselves how they have become a haven for local wildlife.

The Norfolk Wildlife Trust is the lead Trust for the initiative, and James Hogg, its Development Officer, commented that the alarming decline in the abundance of wildlife and the plight of species under threat means that just protecting the nature we have left is not enough; we need to put nature into recovery, and to do so at scale and with urgency.
The project is a fantastic example of how people can transform nature-poor areas into new nature-rich places and change the way we think about land, seizing opportunities to help nature outside traditional nature reserves.
“Thanks to the care and attention of our team of station adopters, we have thousands upon thousands of plants thriving at our rail stations which helps not only to make them more welcoming, but are benefiting the environment too. Many of these gardens have been designed to be wildlife friendly, enhancing biodiversity and providing food, shelter and breeding places for many different types of wildlife, helping to improve the local environment and helping our stations to exist more harmoniously with their rural surroundings.”
Alan Neville Greater Anglia’s Customer and Community Engagement Manager
Responses
The forground makes it from another simple picture!