Friends of Marple Memorial Park Task Days
The Friends hold regular task days in the park on the last Saturday of each month in the winter and the middle and last Saturday from March to November. Everyone is welcome to join in for as long or as short they wish during the specified times. Please note that children and young people under 18 must be accompanied by a responsible adult.
If you are interested becoming a volunteer with us please get in touch and we will add you to our Task Day notifications.
We like to keep a record of what we get up and here are details of past task days.
At last the weather allowed us to make a start on painting of the Bowling Green buildings - but will it let us finish this year? We also managed, thanks to Patrick, to get a coat of wood treatment on the stocks, Midnight and all the ground sculptures. A special thank you to Ken from the Bowling Club, who also joined us today to help with the painting. With not enough tins of paint to go around we also gave the Bowling Green itself a good tidy-up - a most productive day.
A miserably wet morning didn't bode well for our French Boules Tournament in the afternoon and all we managed was a bit of weeding around the ornamental flowerbeds in between the showers before getting set up for that. By 12.30 pm we had gazebos up but it was lashing down and looking very bleak. Typical August weather! Thankfully as people started to arrive things started to look a bit better and as it turned out it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. To read more about the tournament visit the French Boules Court Project page.
A damp summer day but thankfully it didn't chuck it down until after we'd finished. The Pear sculpture was returned to its rightful place next to the apple at the back of the library. The ornamental beds are looking lush and bright after plenty of rain and now look even better following weeding and dead-heading. We also managed to do some more lopping and pruning in a couple of the shrub beds. A productive day!
Proper June weather at last allowed us to get on with the job of sanding down and treating the sculpture behind the library, which we'd put off from the May task day. In addition, more of the Friends joined in with pupils from Marple Hall to weed and mulch the shrub bed nearest the entrance and also to do part of the bed alongside the cinema.
Sadly Marple Hall will miss the next two task days due to the school holidays but we look forward to welcoming them back in September as they have been a huge help in maintaining the park already this year.
This month, as well as our normal task day on the last Saturday, two members helped to plant up the ornamental flower beds in coalition government colours (we're assured it's a coincidence) before Carnival Day.
Despite the miserable weather we still had a couple of Marple Hall pupils and their teacher turn up, which is fantastic! The old die-hards were there too and between us all we managed to get the ornamental beds weeded and ready for the summer bedding to go in, which will start to make the park look much brighter and sunnier even if the weather doesn't play ball.
We had been planning to sand down the sculpture in the Breathing Places area but that was scuppered by the rain and put off until next month. Will it rain in June too?
We were very pleased to welcome back pupils from Marple Hall School on an absolutely perfect day for working in the park. They made a fantastic job of re-planting the Oldknow Shuttle Stone flower bed with new plants and also did some weeding of the ornamental beds ready for summer bedding, which will go in soon. Thank you Marple Hall!
The Friends of the Park tackled another of the large shrub bed and treated the tree sculpture and ground sculptures with preservative. We also weeded the War Memorial beds, which are looking very dry at the moment and - dare we say it - could do with a bit of rain!
