Fife station's wildlife garden is on track

Members of Floral Action Burntisland at the town's railway station. Neil Madigan, Leo du Feu, Bob Malcolm, Margaret Caldwell, Louis Wall, Val Crossan

A biodiversity project to attract more wildlife to Burntisland station was given a boost from some special visitors last week.

John Yellowlees, ScotRail ambassador and Louis Wall, Scottish Civic Trust civic champion stopped off at the station to see the project for themselves and give some advice to the team working on the initiative.

They were met by Bob Malcolm, station team manager with Scotrail and volunteers with Floral Action Burntisland (FAB).

Mr Wall is the recipient of many awards for his work on stations in South West Scotland, including the Streets Ahead best community initiative 2016.

He made some recommendations to the group based on his experience of floral planting in stations, and showed them photographs of the 20 station gardens he is responsible for, including Dumfries, Largs and Ayr.

These feature a ‘Biblical’ garden with figs and dates, an ‘Incredible Edibles’ garden and a ‘Wedding’ garden in Gretna.

Mr Malcolm was also on hand to advise the group on practicalities such as locating water butts and information signs, which local wildlife artist Leo du Feu will be painting specially for the project.

Neil Madigan, a wildlife-friendly gardener from Burntisland has exciting plans to create a garden which will attract birds, butterflies and ladybirds.

The biodiversity project, which attracted the highest funding awarded in Scotland under the Abelio/Keep Scotland Beautiful scheme, will be completed later this summer.

Margaret Caldwell, station volunteer with FAB, said: “Work has already started and it was very useful to speak to Mr Malcolm about things like what the best plants to use would be and watering systems.

“Starley Hall School has made a bug hotel for us and we hope to get Burntisland Primary involved too.”