Braywick Nature Centre

Delighted that the Braywick Nature Centre garden has been awarded Silver in the Wild Maidenhead Wild About Gardens Award.

This shows we have various wildlife friendly features including wildflowers, fruit trees, organic vegetables and compost. We hope to improve the garden further to obtain gold next year!

Do you recognise this location? 👀

☺️ We are so happy to announce our new way marker posts for three Braywick Nature Reserve trails are now in place.

👣 The Kingfisher trail, Woodpecker trail and Butterfly trail will guide you on different routes around the reserve.

ℹ️ Information boards have been designed by @stusshed, why not check out our trails?

The Braywick Nature Festival 2022

This May half term was busy at Braywick. On Tuesday our team welcomed families for a relaxing pond dip with water creatures galore, followed by an adventurous search through the grasslands and woodlands in our minibeast safari. The next day we celebrated the new season's beginning with our Explore Summer event. We created journey sticks together by wandering the reserve hearing stories, collecting and attaching them to remember our journey. This was a new activity and got really positive feedback: we hope to mark each change of season with the similar event!

In order to conserve nature, we need to know what is around us and how it is changing. Field identification is key to this.

To help enable the brilliant wildlife community groups in our borough, we have purchased some new field monitoring equipment. We are calling this our Lending Library. Equipment is stored at Braywick Nature Centre.

The equipment is free to borrow for Borough residents, to complete their own surveys of local nature. Once surveyed, please fill in the following form and you upload your results to a national monitoring scheme (we will provide more info on this) to ensure the data collected helps conserve our wildlife! This will also help us to complete the targets set in our Biodiversity Action Plan.

Check out the image of just some of the equipment on offer and see the full list written below.

We do ask borrowing groups to be responsible for their own safety and to keep the equipment in good condition.

If you'd like to borrow something, please get in contact with Rosie at bnc@rbwm.gov.uk. We hope you enjoy finding more about the wildlife in your local area.

We love running Deep Forest sessions for children in our woodland classrooms. These include den building and fire lighting, but we are working to expand our programme. We'd love to lead activities on foraging, other bush craft skills and cooking on an open fire. Do you have any other ideas? Get in contact via the channels on the right hand side.

The Natural Environment Team were asked recently to provide a sustainable alternative to cut flowers at the RBWM Awards Ceremony. We decided to buy and lend some pollinator friendly shrubs for the tables. In our RBWM purple of course. These looked fantastic wrapped in bright tissue paper. The lavenders and wallflowers have since been planted into the garden at Braywick. Come and see if you're passing!