As spring continues to breathe life into Hammersmith Park, our dedicated volunteers gathered once again at the Japanese Garden of Peace for a focused day of maintenance. In this session, we concentrated solely on managing our bamboo growth, a vital task to ensure the health and aesthetics of the garden. We have not touched the pond this time, as we evaluate the results of a new treatment intended to combat algae using environment-safe bacteria - if successful, this will very significantly reduce the amount of work we need to do routinely in the pond and allow us to focus on other tasks. Fingers crossed!
Bamboo Management Takes Center Stage
Our primary goal for the day was to thin out the bamboo, especially around critical areas of the garden that had seen significant overgrowth. We focused on three main areas:
Frithville Entrance: Near the entrance from Frithville Gardens, we’ve made significant headway in clearing the bamboo wall. It’s not just about cutting back; it's about letting light seep through, brightening the area and making the garden more welcoming.
Clearing the Secret Hideout: The southeast end of the garden hosts a little "bamboo secret hideout" that had become overly dense. Many of the entrances leading in and out were blocked, which also posed security and antisocial behaviour challenges. We've now reopened all of these, and while there’s more work to be done, the improvement is already noticeable.
The Streams: At the back of the streams, we finished thinning the bamboo and removed several dead trees that had died out - we left them last time around after freeing them hoping they might have recovered, but at a closer inspection this time it became clear they were completely dead - just touching the branches made them fall off. Hopefully, we've not just cleaned up this area but also ensured that the remaining trees won't be suffocated anymore!
If you're walking through the Garden in the next few days, you might notice that we haven't just cut about a third of the canes: we've also carefully removed all the lower branches and leaves to reduce the overall volume and make the canes themselves stand out. It's quite a remarkable effect, especially with black canes and closely resembles the way bamboo is managed back in Japan.
While the result was great, it wasn't easy sailing. Cutting old, broken, and yellow bamboo stems proved challenging due to the sheer volume of overgrowth and wanting to preserve the good stems from getting damaged. The task was tough but our volunteers pushed through with determination, making substantial progress in critical garden areas and the before and after comparison at the top makes it more real.
Looking Ahead
We will continue our efforts in the upcoming sessions, especially focusing back on the "bamboo secret hideout" and the entrance areas. Each session brings us closer to restoring the Japanese Garden of Peace to its full beauty and functionality.
Thank you to all the volunteers who participated in this session. Your hard work is what keeps this garden a peaceful, beautiful spot for everyone in the community to enjoy. Stay tuned for more updates and join us next time to help make a difference in this cherished space!
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