Island 2000 Trust Blog

Well, it’s 1.30am on Saturday, and it has been a hectic week. We were pleased to welcome Solo, organisers of the Isle of Wight Festival as our first corporate members of Gift to Nature recently. Part of our partnership with the Festival involves us manning a tent with information on Island conservation and in particular our Bees project developed jointly with the Festival. As usual with these things, everything took longer than usual to arrange, printers let us down at the last minute and so on. Then to top things off the weather on Thursday meant vehicles were banned from the festival site in the late afternoon - just as we needed to get all our gear on! A hectic morning followed on Friday, but we managed to get set up in time for things kicking off onsite at 2pm. We had a bit of a soft start on Friday afternoon, but will be pursuing Festival Goers tomorrow (I mean later today) with a vengeance, encouraging them to plant our fabbie bee wicks and part with their cash in pursuit of Bee conservation. Give Bees A Chance.

We’ve teamed up with Biffa and IW Festival and asked artists to decorate 10 bins that will be used as part of the festival this coming weekend. You can see eight of them here, we’ll post pictures of the ninth one, done by Michael Forrest, when we’ve delivered it to the site. The tenth one is the lovely Bee Bin that Aaron Fletcher did which will actually be used as donation bin over the weekend in the Gift to Nature tent. We don’t know where they’ll end up but hopefully they’ll help festival organisers in their efforts to make the festival a more green and litter free place. Dave Badman enlisted help from students at Chale Primary school to do his large bin. After an educational lesson all about waste, recycling and what to do with your rubbish the children designed their own cartoon story based on imaginary festival goer ‘Rocky’, as he says, “Don’t be a litterbug”!

Here’s a better shot of the Yarrow Broomrape with AlarmGnome temporarily disabled. It really is a very beautiful thing, much more so than many of the broomrapes which tend to look dead even when they’re alive. The reason for is that they have no chlorophyll and so aren’t green at all. They don’t need to make food in the usual photosynthetic

way because they are in fact obligate parasites living off the food and water in neighbouring plants by tapping into their roots. Many broomrapes are very specific and are named after their hosts. Yarrow Broomrape parasitizes yarrow - a very familiar plant which makes it all the stranger that this broomrape is so rare.

One of the island’s rarest flowers is in safe hands. The rather beautiful Yarrow Broomrape (the purple flower in the picture) has acquired ‘AlarmGnome’ technology thanks to a grant from the SBPF (Spurious Botanical Projects Fund). If anyone should approach the plants AlarmGnome issues a first warning: ” Step Away from the Flowers”. If this doesn’t ward them off and they get still closer risking harm to the Broomrape, then AlarmGnome gives a second warning of “Back Off Now, or Suffer”. If this still doesn’t deter the deranged intruder then AlarmGnome becomes AttackGnome and you really don’t want to know what happens next.

Suffice to say, it’s not pretty.

Multi sensory artwork hits East Cowes

Have you seen the painted Alphabet on Castle Street, East Cowes as part of Island 2000 Trust’s No Barriers project? Not only is this a colourful visual treat, passers by can now get their ears tickled too. Artists Aaron Fletcher and Nathan Holt, who painted the alphabet and all the alliterative words to go along with it, are also part of Ventnor based ‘Blank Beats’. They created their very own ‘Alpharap’ rapping the words that are part of the alphabet they’ve created.

Island 2000 have set up a system whereby you can now call free phone 0800 959 6400 and listen to the ‘Alpharap’ down the phone and on the move.

The Island 2000 Arts team said, “We love the idea of this artwork and we don’t think there’s anything else like this on the Island. It’s a temporary multi-sensory public artwork, but more excitingly, it’s street karaoke!”

The track is available to listen to until the end of August 2008. To listen to more Blank Beat tracks log onto: www.myspace.com/blankbeats

The Education and Community team have been busy installing raised beds in gardens on Pan Estate.  A joint project with Medina Housing Association is encouraging residents to “grow their own” by providing a raised bed, soil, vegetable seeds and a tool kit for up to 50 households in the ward.  Most of the beds are now installed and ready to be planted up for the growing season, and Island 2000 will be holding a series of drop-in sessions throughout the summer offering advice on gardening using raised beds and suggesting recipes that will use produce from the garden.

Ray and his raised bed

A raised bed frame takes shape