Although we survey all our countryside properties for wildlife, few wildlife surveys have taken place within our formal gardens. We do not have the resources available to carry out the massive surveys that are required in our gardens, which is why we need your help.
How you can help:
We want you to record any interesting wildlife you see in our gardens and send it to us by email. We are looking, in particular, for:
- Records of scarce species for which the garden is likely to be fulfilling an important role.
- Species and habitat features.
- The weird and wonderful!
What happens to your email:
- On submitting records to the email address you will receive an auto reply acknowledging receipt - we may get back to you - especially if you've found something significant.
- The information will be collated by volunteers, and fed into our wildlife database.
- The information will then be forwarded to national and county species recording schemes.
- We will of course also inform the garden - they certainly need to know!
Volunteers:
The venture really does depend on volunteers! We need help not only in conducting the survey, but also processing the results. If you are interested in getting involved -please do contact us. Volunteers could process data either in the Trust’s new head office in Swindon or at home, through their own computers.
Guide to the regions:
Here is a region-by-region guide to what we know we have living in our gardens.
The 'small print':
- Unfortunately we will not be able to send individual email responses to you.
- We regret that we are not able to handle written correspondence at this stage.
- We cannot currently accept large attachments such as jpegs. If you have something of interest, we would advise that you mention it in your email, and we can contact you about it.
- Sadly we cannot help with identification, again due to capacity, so please don't email pictures for identification.
Note:
The Trust's formal gardens are managed as Gardens, not as nature reserves - though obviously we try to accommodate wildlife as much as is possible within the parameters of gardens and gardening.
The term 'Garden' can be hard to define! This study is confined the National Trust historic gardens that are open regularly to the public. We are excluding parks, but pleasure grounds are a grey area. We are happy to include the core areas of the likes of Clumber, Stourhead and Stowe, but are omitting open parks and the less flowery pleasure grounds such as Croome.
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