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.
Task Day 17 April 2021
Friends of the Park officially get back to work at last!
Following clearance from the council to return to the park for our task days the weather played ball and treated us to some much needed sunshine.
The principal task was to get back on top of the main flowerbed maintenance but we also got stuck into treating of benches, removal of self-seeded saplings in the shrub beds and litter-picking throughout the park. We also planted some fruit bushes donated by a Marple resident and cleared out the Bowling Pavilion canopy ready for the start of the Bowling season.
Earlier this month we also got work back underway in the Bandroom Garden.
New Flags Flying in Memorial Park
Friends of the Park are not able to do task days at the moment but have popped some new flags up recently:
Task Day 08 December 2020
Nativity Sculptures installed on Market Street!
Adding to the spirit of Christmas in Marple, Friends of Memorial Park finished the year as they started it (in reverse) by installing the Market Street Nativity sculptures this afternoon. This was following a clean-up, refresh and new varnish by metal artist Wayne Chaisty during the autumn. Did you know it was 14 years ago, in 2006 when Wayne made these!
Task Day 04 November 2020
Lockdown 2 set to stop us in our tracks again!
With Lockdown 2 looming tomorrow we decided a final tidy-up of the main flowerbeds and war memorial beds was essential in order to be in the best possible shape for this year's Remembrance, whatever that may be. The main activities were weeding, trimming and tidying the beds, raising a new Remembrance flag and adding fresh wreaths to the railings at the war memorial and the timeline. We also managed a litter-pick, filled in ruts caused by a police vehicle in the park and did a serious and long overdue hack-back of the rhododendrons in one of the shrub beds.
We were joined by council officer Wayne, who did a final picking of stones from the wildflower meadow area too. The council team were also out in force, clearing leaves from the main drive and car park.
It was a lovely day and visitors to the park popped almost £20 in our collection bucket, thank you!
Wall of Remembrance
We would like to say well done to the Marple Poppy Appeal Team, who created a "Wall of Remembrance" on the bowling green fence this year using street poppies annotated with names and dates. It was a very evocative and thought-provoking display, helping to bring home the number of Marple men lost in both World Wars and other conflicts.
Task Day 10 October 2020
Task day brought forward due to weather forecast
The weather forecast for this weekend was far better at the start of the week, so we brought our planned task day forward. However, the park was so wet today that we couldn't work on the grassed areas without doing damage, so we focused on tidying shrub borders that could be accessed from tarmac. This included the Infants Play Area, the border from the library woodland to the Band Room and we also made a start on the one next to Hollins House too.
Task Day 24 October 2020
Mushroom compost spread on flowerbeds at last!
Better weather today meant that we could at last get back onto the flowerbeds, where we finally managed to distribute the mushroom compost that was delivered too late to go on the beds earlier this year. We also worked on shrub beds by the side of Hollins House and down towards the band room. The usual litter pick was conducted, two Rowan trees donated by a member of the public were planted and the war memorial and noticeboards given a clean too.
We also managed to get onto the wildflower meadow area at last and get some stone-picking done.
Friends of the Park working on the Wildflower Meadow area (Photo: Chris Paul)