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Camden News - by SIMON WROE
Published: 2 April 2009

Discarded flowers in St Martin’s Gardens

‘Dumping flowers is blooming ridiculous’

Public garden money being thrown away, say group

SPRING: the season of nature awakening and lambs frolicking. Or in one Camden Town park, hundreds of flowers being thrown away in full bloom.
Neighbours of St Martin’s Gardens, near Camden Street, have accused park chiefs of “wanton squandering”, claiming the Town Hall is wasting money from the public purse by over-ordering large quantities of flowers that sit in the garden depot and never see the light of day.
In an effort to remedy the problem, four volunteers from the Friends of St Martin’s Gardens planted more than 70 primula flowers in the empty parts of the park’s flowerbeds on Saturday.
But they were shocked to find on Monday morning that all the flowers had been dug up again and discarded in heavy-duty sacks.
Poet Dinah Livingstone, who has lived in St Martin’s Close for 43 years, said: “We always seem to be like the Cinderella park. There are always bare patches, and we have been asking them for years to give us more colour.
“For two years they have been massively over-ordering bedding plants and then leaving them to die.
“When we ask about them they are adamant they can’t be planted in our park.
“I think they’re being very high-handed.”
Park officers said the flowers had been dug up because “they did not fit into the landscape design,” claimed Ms Livingstone.
In recent years the council has been applauded for cleaning up St Martin’s Gardens, once a trouble spot which attracted drug addicts and anti-social behaviour.
Maureen Patterson, also a member of the Friends of St Martin’s Gardens, said: “All the rates went up last year but they’re dumping hundreds of pounds of flowers.”
At least 500 spare geraniums were given away at the garden’s St Martin’s Festival last year, added Ms Patterson.
A Camden Council spokesman said contractors always order more flowers “to compensate for those lost through vandalism and theft”, adding: “Over the weekend planting appears to have gone ahead and the gardener in St Martin’s Gardens had to remove the plants as they had been planted on top of newly emerging herbaceous plants, which would have stopped them from coming through.”

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