Butterfly Bank  - photo above shows a Small Blue on the BB on 23 May 2023

The Brilliant Butterflies Project was set up in 2021 and worked with Croydon Council and local communities to create more wildflower areas for butterflies and other insects. They selected a site in our car park field on which to build a Butterfly Bank. The intention was that when the Project ended in 2022 the maintenance of the BB would be taken on by FSW.

They created a chalk bund in our car park field on 19th  April 2021. See the section Creating the Chalk Bank 19 April 2021 below for details of the construction work.

On Sunday 25th April this was sown, by FSW volunteers, with butterfly friendly seeds and planted with 250 small plug plants of various wildflower species (Birds-foot Trefoil, Cowslip, Knapweed (greater & lesser), Ox-eye Daisy, Rock-rose, Scabious, Thyme and Yarrow) to supplement the chalk grassland seed mix. This will help support many species including the Small Blue Butterfly. See the section Planting the Chalk Bank 25 April 2021.

The Kidney Vetch and Marjoram plug plants that should have been included were not available this season so in 2022 the FSW purchased another set of 144 plug plants of Kidney Vetch, Marjoram, Wild Thyme, Rock Rose, Hairy Violet and Small Scabious. These were planted on the BB on a workday on 8th May 2022. See the Workdays page for details.

We were advised that the Butterfly Bank would take a year to establish and 2 or 3 years to thrive. We were assured that the low nutrient chalk would ensure that, thereafter, the wildflowers will last for many years with very little maintenance.

However, by the end of 2023 it was clear that the chalk bunds sited around Croydon were not achieving the objective of keeping down grass and encouraging wild flowers. Our bund was clearly very overgrown with grass with few of the original plants thriving. One of the Friends, Valerie Baldry, knew of a much more successful butterfly bank elsewhere that was not composed of chalk. It was decided that she would work on a small area of our bund, digging out the grass, fertilising with top soil and well rotted manure and replanting with butterfly friendly flowers. This work is described in the 2024 section below. 

Please do not walk on the planted area and keep your dogs away.

Entries below show development of the chalk bank in reverse order with the most recent at the top.

Butterfly Bank greening after the rain 25 May 2021

The photos below taken by Ruth Budd show the response of the BB to a few days of heavy rain. The seeds have begun to sprout and even a worm has come to visit.

Creating the Chalk Bank 19 April 2021

I arrived in the car park field at 8.30am and found an assortment of vehicles already there. Steve Bolton, from Butterfly Conservation, and his two helpers were setting out the area on the ground where the bund and flat area were to go. 

Once that was done the area was surrounded by a temporary plastic fence then the digger was used to remove the turf layer.  The turf was then moved to create the bund and the digger was used to run over it to firm it before returning to scrape up subsoil which was spread over the new bund. The digger bucket was used to smooth out the soil over the bund surface. 

Two large tipper lorries arrived with their loads of fine chalk and tipped it in piles on to the flat scraped area. The chalk was transferred to the bund to cover it up to 30cm deep and the flat area was then smoothed out. I left at 11.48am before the work was actually finished but there was little more to do other than tidy up.