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WILDFLOWER TURF
SELECTED FOR
JUBILEE RIVER EMBANKMENT RESTORATION
The Jubilee River diversion scheme is the largest of its kind in
the country and, as an integral part of the project, the Environment
Agency ensured landscape treatments incorporated wildflowers and
other planting with a local provenance, providing maximum benefits
for the local environment in terms of ecology, landscape and
recreational value. The Agency was mindful this philosophy should be
rigidly adhered to in the planning stages for restoration of a 300m
stretch of embankment affected by heavy flooding. Their brief
stipulated a grassed finish should be used as a starting point but
also acknowledged this alone would appear too urbanised and not in
keeping with the surrounding environment. Bearing in mind these
factors and to be consistent with the riverbanks already established
patterns, Atkins, as part of the landscape design consortium,
proposed wildflower planting as the ideal solution.
A number of options were considered. Conventional seeding was
ruled out as being too lengthy a process and with the probability of
only giving a patchy end result, especially as seeding would take
place during the Autumn. Conventional turfing with plug planted
wildflowers was another possibility discarded on cost and time
consumption. Research eventually led them to pre-sown wildflower
soil-less turf from Coronet Turf. Coronet could not only provide the
extensive mix of wildflower planting required but were able to
supply material in large roll sizes of approx. 20m length and 2m
width in just eight weeks from order for quick and easy laying on
site. The embankment's entire length with 4700 sq.m of cover was
then laid in only six days. Tilhill were responsible for
implementation on site and their Site Manager, Julian Hollingdale
comments: 'environment mitigation is a significant part of our
business and we take special care in procurement and resourcing for
this type of scheme. We were particularly pleased with the Coronet
product and have the opportunity of ensuring successful
establishment as part of our 5 year maintenance contract with the
Environment Agency'.
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Coronet Turf believe their pre-sown soil-less Wildflower Turf is
the only product of this nature currently available on the
market today.
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