Through her funded project, environmental artist Natalie Taylor will work in North Edinburgh to extend a series of existing public space artworks incorporating wildflowers to provide nectar-rich habitats and food sources for pollinators. The long-term vision is that these artworks, using large-scale text cut into the landscape, will join up to form a bee corridor across North Edinburgh.

By engaging the City of Edinburgh Council and the North Edinburgh community in devising, implementing, and managing this project, Natalie Taylor hopes to enable people to have agency and ownership during a time of climate anxiety and feelings of powerlessness. Activities such as planting wild seeds and enhancing relatively poor grassland into more biodiverse areas will create opportunities to enhance our natural environment while celebrating community collective action for nature.

Natalie Taylor said, “I am so pleased to be able to work alongside local communities to design, develop and implement the new environmental artwork, sharing skills in meadow maintenance and strategic seeding to increase local biodiversity. Through fun, creative workshops, I will highlight the importance of our relationship with insect pollinators, which contribute vital services to roughly one-third of our food. I see this creative action for biodiversity as really important at the moment due to the ongoing crisis in pollinator populations, especially in urban environments such as Edinburgh where there are so many natural spaces where we can potentially help them.”