Wraps Off...The Cliff Gardens

wRAPS oFF...The Cliff Gardens: A new Community Garden for Seaford’s Seafront

Imagine a beautiful garden of native plants in the tourist area at Splash Point, alongside the Kittiwake colony, the Shoal Bench and entrance to the South Downs National Park and Seaford Head Nature Reserve. This muchloved and visited part of the Esplanade has been the subject of our attentions during the last 15 months, and along with the new Martello toilets and concessions, we think it deserves a make-over!

Seaford Community Partnership embarked on this project to improve an ugly, deeply pot-holed and unmade-up road between Cliff Gardens and the Esplanade, as part of its contribution to the South Downs National Park Authority’s ‘Ouse Valley Climate Action’ National Lottery bid. At that time, little did we know the complexities of such a project!

So much later, having negotiated funding sources to match possible lottery money; discovered which permissions are needed (no mean task..) and sought permissions from the Councils involved; researched suitable construction materials for the beds and pathways; made educational links with Seaford Schools and the Railway Land Nature Reserve in Lewes, we decided on the purpose, and main features of the garden and commissioned local Garden designers Gabby Tofts and Christian Funnell to create it.

Our aim has been to create an inspirational and attractive garden with links to the Shoal and the Martello Tower and fields surrounding it – part educational and awareness-raising, part sculptural, and calling for Seaford community involvement of sponsorship and volunteering. It will be a place to relax, to socialize, and to reflect not only on the climate crisis of our times but importantly and optimistically, what we can do about it. The garden is a ‘Climate Change Garden’, showing how plants can survive in different environmental conditions and how they will need to adapt to the predicted effects of Climate Change of droughts, floods and storms in future years.

The garden will be made up of large beds, showing how plants start to colonise salty shingle conditions and gradually form communities of plants providing shelter for each other, creating soil on chalky cliffs and eventually chalk grassland which we are so fortunate to enjoy on the South Downs. The increased plant diversity attracts pollinators like bees, butterflies and insects, provides food for birds and small mammals and creates the biodiversity that nature’s intricate food webs need.

The beds will be contained in Corten steel surrounds – each bed representing a different habitat with the plants that can grow there. Our coastline consists of distinct areas: shingle beach, chalk cliffs and chalk grassland, each with its own typical mix of plants and flowers. These will be represented, along with those plants that can survive extremes of drought and seasonal flooding. And lastly we will create a large garden of plants, both native and cultivated, that Seaford gardeners can grow in their windswept coastal gardens to encourage pollinators, provide food for different birds, butterflies and wildlife, and thus increase the biodiversity. Our aim is to create wildlife corridors between the River Ouse and the South Downs.

Alongside the plantings, the garden will contain sculptures by Christian Funnell (designer of the Shoal Bench, Birling Gap sculptures and many other well-known Fishbone features). This will give Sculpture interest in the winter months of storms when the garden will lie low and also provide an opportunity to sponsor plaques – perhaps for our children and grandchildren? We are using sponsorship to involve the community and make them

aware of the threats of climate change to this vulnerable area and also to show how we can mitigate the effects of this climate change by making life-style adaptations. Above all, the garden themes are educational, informative and optimistic that our individual efforts, scaled up, can made a difference.

The sculptures will have a maritime theme – three large painted buoys with bench seating and relevant information plaques in Big buoy the meander path and benches fish sculptures placed in the beds to act as wind-breaks and give height to the garden. These features will offer sponsorship opportunities (as in the Shoal sculpture). Throughout the garden we will position noticeboards, explaining the plantings and many important features of the landscape and its vulnerabilities. A lot of work has been done here in collaboration with Seaford Head School syllabuses and the Railway Land Nature Reserve education department in Lewes so that the garden demonstrates features relevant to school curricula for pupils of all ages. A second part of the garden is the adjacent Pump Field which will be used as a field study area for children to actively observe, monitor and measure the changes that will occur over time.

The garden will have a purpose-built meander path between the beds from Cliff Gardens to the Esplanade, providing easy access for school groups to study the features of the garden, for pushchairs and wheelchairs to travel the length of the garden, and for the general public to enjoy the garden and understand climate change and its implications for this area. There will also be a muchimproved cycle path connecting the Esplanade to the eastern part of the C2 National cycle path.

Above all, this garden is a community project: we hope to form a vibrant Friends of Cliff Gardens group of enthusiastic supporters to volunteer to help with construction and maintenance of the garden and its use as an educational facility.

If you would like to be involved in this project, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us on hm@seafordpartnership.co.uk.

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