Tucked near the outdoor gym pod and Pavilions in the Park, the bee bed is a spot that many visitors walk straight past. That’s a shame, because it has a great story behind it. It has even earned the park a national award.
The bee bed sits inside the octagonal base of the park’s old, thatched bandstand. When the bandstand was removed, the base became a raised flower bed. For a long time, nobody quite knew what to do with it. In 2019, the Friends of Horsham Park and Horsham District Council decided to change that. They ran a competition as part of the Horsham District Year of Culture. Local residents were invited to come up with a new planting design that would be good for wildlife and a pleasure to visit.
The winning design came from Debbie Hepburn, a local resident and regular Wednesday morning volunteer with the Friends group. Debbie started by choosing plants she knew were popular with bees. She used orange and purple contrast to create a display that was both beautiful and brilliant for pollinators. Right at the centre of the bed is a bug hotel, giving solitary insects (including many species of bee) somewhere to nest throughout the year.
The results spoke for themselves. In 2021, Horsham District Council and the Friends of Horsham Park won a national Bees’ Needs Champion Award run by DEFRA, the government department that looks after the environment.
The planting scheme has changed in subsequent years, but what began as a forgotten bandstand base is now one of the most purposeful little corners of the park. And the bees, of course, don’t know any of that — but they seem happy!