Beginners Guide to Invasive Plant Management

Love Springwater Park is a community group I am involved with, which was founded in September 2017. We are a group made up of people from Whitefield in Greater Manchester who are dedicated to maintaining and improving Springwater Park for the benefit of local communities and the environment. The park is around 120 acres of green space located at the convergence of the River Irwell and River Roch in Bury. It was formerly an industrial site housing three factories, but now belongs to Bury Council and comprises of riverside meadow / floodplain surrounded by lodges and woodland. Part of the site was also historically a municipal tip.

One of the big challenges for the group has been tackling invasive plants on the site. There are large areas covered in Giant Hogweed, Himalayan Balsam and Japanese Knotweed on site which have a huge impact upon native species and biodiversity as a whole. You can read more about the different challenges of these plants on our site on the Love Springwater Park website.

Over the last four years we have approached invasive plants in a range of different ways in the park. This design aims to share our learning with other groups who may be starting to tackle invasive weeds in a greenspace. It focuses upon creating a guide to share what our group has learned with others. It uses Dragon Dreaming as a framework. This is a decision making and project design tool which can be accessed freely online. It aims to support individuals and groups to work in a way which is playful, inspiring and innovative to make their dreams come true. As noted in the evaluation for this design the use of the framework in this context doesn’t go beyond the use of its basic structure and does not come close to exploring its full capacity as a participatory and visionary framework.

The design is not available as a pdf but can instead be accessed in full here.