Bankside Sunflower Challenge

Celebrate the summer by getting involved in the Bankside Sunflower Challenge

To celebrate the return to Bankside and rebuild connections across our neighbourhood, we’re running a sunflower challenge in collaboration with Bankside Open Spaces Trust.  We’re inviting everyone to join in, from Bankside businesses to local community groups, people still working at home and those who live in the local area.

For Bankside businesses and workers, we’re encouraging you to find spaces in or around your workplaces to plant out your sunflowers, whether you’re lucky enough to have some dedicated outside space such as a balcony, roof or courtyard; but if not, we can help you identify somewhere close to your building to plant them where you can continue to keep an eye on them, water them and nurture them as they grow.

To help you look after your sunflowers, Better Bankside has a few toolkits that you can borrow including hand tools and watering cans, but we’re also encouraging you to reuse and repurpose what you have to hand, such as reusing plastic bottles for watering or repurposing old containers as seed and plant pots.

We’re also encouraging people to ‘grow one and give one’ so that we can pass on your extra sunflower seedlings to local community groups or plant them out in the network of green spaces that Bankside Urban Forest has developed across the area.

Throughout the year, we’ll also be running a series of events to support you from sowing seeds, to planting your sunflowers out and later on in the year, how to harvest, store and use the seeds from your sunflowers.  In the summer, we’ll also launch a fun challenge to celebrate all the sunflowers across Bankside, with fun categories such as the tallest, brightest or most unusual growing spot.

To sign up to be part of the Bankside Sunflower Challenge, please complete our short registration form.  We will send you more info including a growing guide, keep you up to date with our sunflower events and if you need it, advice about where in Bankside you can plant out your sunflowers when they’re ready.

The sunflower challenge is part of ‘Everybody’s Garden’, a new initiative to encourage everyone in Bankside to reclaim pockets of potential green space across the neighbourhood, recognising the increased appreciation for green space and how important connecting to nature is for our wellbeing.