OLYMPIC FEATURE
The Olympics will come and go, but their legacy will permanently transform the landscape of east London and the variety of plants and animals it supports. Horticultural ecologists Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough describe their contribution.
Park life T
he London Olympic Park in Stratford is the largest new urban park to be developed in Europe for 150 years. It is highly innovative, based on an ambitious longterm vision to create a world-class visitor destination and then to transform it into a park for local communities. One of the many things that set this project apart from a typical city park is that the whole plan, including the planting strategy, is dictated by the park’s Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), which sets out the range of habitats and species the park needs to support. One of the planning conditions for the park was that it must provide 50 hectares of new habitat. In reality this means that most of the green space on the site must in some way contribute to the BAP. Given that the park and sporting venues will receive several million day-visitors over the period of the Olympics and Paralympics, this is a major challenge; we have to meet ecological goals and visitors’ aesthetic and recreational needs at the same time.
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PLANET EARTH Summer 2012
Luckily this is an area we know a lot about. Much of our work focuses on delivering ecological benefits in everyday environments like parks, highways, gardens, schools and commercial areas, rather than in designated nature reserves or nature gardens which some people might never visit. This means we’re used to giving equal weight to aesthetics and ecological concerns. We were invited to be the park’s horticultural and planting design consultants in 2008, working with landscape architecture consortium LDA/Hargreaves. Our role has been to develop a planting strategy for the whole site for both 2012 and the subsequent two-year ‘transformation’ period, when the park will be converted to public use. Two parks in one The Olympic Park has two distinct areas. The north park is bigger and has an informal ‘country park’ approach, while the south park, which includes the main Olympic stadium, has a more urban, ‘festival’ feel. The vegetation and design of the two areas
reflect these different characters. The vegetation in the north park is dominated by designed versions of native UK habitats, and celebrates native biodiversity. These habitats include speciesrich meadows of different types, the largest area of wet woodland habitat in the UK, reedbeds, woodlands, flowering lawns and sustainable urban drainage features like rain gardens and bioswales (plant-filled depressions that help slow and clean water as it runs off the land). The south park focuses on visual drama. The Stadium Meadows are the largest areas of direct-sown annual meadows ever created in the UK and have seas of annual asters and daisies that are a magnet to pollinating insects. The 2012 Gardens are almost a square kilometre of stunning perennial plantings that celebrate the British gardening tradition and its exceptionally rich diversity of plants. Being able to work on site for the past two years has given us the opportunity for some trial and error, letting us make sure the park will be at its best when the games take place,