Living Landscapes

I know I keep going on about the Living Landscapes, but I think it's something we could really do something with.

Neville the Toad explains it quite nicely...

Neville lives under an old shed in a garden and eats moths. The gardener likes Neville and sometimes throws him a worm. But Neville’s lonely. Sometimes he wonders if he’s the last of his kind.

When his grandfather was alive there use to be thousands of toads, hopping across the meadows to breed in spring time. Making the nearby lane into a big new road stopped that. Then a new housing estate filled in the main pond.

Bit by bit the woods and meadows where the toads lived and spawned disappeared and Neville was cut off. But one day men came to build a special toad tunnel under the new road. One of the farmers dug a new pond to store water for his fields.

Local school children helped plant a hedgerow to shelter small animals. People built ponds in their gardens in the new housing estate. For the first time in his life, Neville found he could wander and meet other toads. Soon there were more toads in the neighbourhood. And other wildlife too.

People and wildlife found they could live side by side after all.

Living Landscapes is basically about joining our landscapes up by creating habitat wherever we can (gardens, school grounds, verges, hedges etc) and making it possible for animals and people to live in the same place. Do any of you have any ideas for a project we could do to get this message and some actions across to young people in Sussex?

Sarah