Our Wildlife Trust’s 2021 Wildlife Gardening at Work competition maintained some adaptations from last year's awards to allow entries, not only from workplace grounds, but also from home-workers’ gardens. We received some inspiring entries this year that show how these awards encourage companies and their employees to help make a real difference for wildlife at their place of work and thereby benefit employee wellbeing.
This year we asked participants to complete as many tasks as possible from a list of 30 wildlife gardening challenges to chime with our goal, as the movement of Wildlife Trusts, to secure at least 30% of our land and sea for nature’s recovery by 2030. These challenges included everything from taking a wildlife photo and feeding the birds, to creating a new wildlflower meadow and starting a wildlife pond.
We have been extremely impressed by the dedication to these tasks across all entries, but there were two in particular that stood out.
The winner of this year's Wildlife Gardening at Work Award is Arthur Rank Hospice Charity. They successfully completed 21 of the 30 wildlife challenges. They included photographic evidence of a badger sighting at the hospice (below) and had a creative collaboration with the hospice knitting group (below) to brighten paths with wildflowers and some lamppost decorations!
