Management and maintenance
We maintain a wide variety of parks, wildlife areas, sports pitches, play areas, road verges, open spaces and council housing areas throughout Leicester.
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Leicester’s parks and green spaces are wildlife havens in the midst of a busy built up city. Our wildlife areas and local nature reserves add greatly to the biodiversity of the city and contain unusual and rare species.
We work hard to encourage a wide variety of plants and animals into our parks. Most of our parks and greenspaces have at least a small space set aside for wildlife which may include:
- Long grass and wildflower areas
- Ponds
- Bee posts
- Insect friendly planting
- Nest boxes
- Special habitats.
Sometimes all that is needed is to stop maintaining an area to encourage the wildlife. In other places we change our maintenance schedule; for example only cutting grass once per year to encourage a meadow to develop or planting special area to encourage bees and butterflies.
Our wildflower verges project has brought splashes colour of attractive colour to roadsides in the city both from the flowers and the butterflies they attract.
Bees
Our bees and other pollinating insects are in crisis. It's a complex problem that scientists the world over are trying to fathom, but the prognosis is grim, without healthy populations of insect pollinators across the world, our food security is under threat.
Our pollinating insects are vital to the population of the vast majority of the fruits and vegetables we need in our healthy five-a-day diets. If we don't start to look after our insect pollinators, eventually our favourite foods could vanish from our supermarket shelves, from apples and pears through to coffee and chocolate.
Research has shown that one of the main reasons our pollinators are under threat is due to their poor health and nutrition. A lack of a rich and varied supply of pollen and nectar throughout the year to feed our insect workforce, is leaving them vulnerable to the effects of pesticides and parasites and threatening some species with extinction.
Biodiversity in parks
Leicester's biodiversity action plan summarises what is known about the most important areas of green space and how they provide a place for animals and plants to survive in Leicester. It also provides information on the many organisations and local groups that have contributed to conserving wildlife in the city. Find out more on the Promoting biodiversity webpage.Â
More information
Look out for the information boards on the sites or download one of our sheets below.