Let it Bee
Anonymous

A lake of wildflowers from a drainage basin

Detention basins in the flat plains of Penrith serve a purpose only in rare flood events. If not large enough for an oval, the basin is merely a sterile monoculture of high maintenance turf.

Let it bee, is a proposal to convert these spaces into attractive, biodiverse, and lively landscapes of grasses, flora, and fauna. How?

Remove turf. Sow a meadow. Let It bee.

A lake of colourful wildflowers responding to the natural elements, harvesting sunshine, supporting life within its glowing surface. Blooming flowers, shimmering grassland, dancing butterflies, native bees, and a myriad of pollinators freely provide a source of life and delight. These ecosystems provide food for fauna, nesting material for birds and support a variety of biodiversity and the
systems they sustain.

Biodiverse hot spots like this are rare in the public domain and often located in left over land, with facilities facing away from the ‘wilderness’ in favour of formalised areas. This proposal seeks
to reverse the arrangement, to include paths, seats, bridges and infrastructure to celebrate and value the re-wilding of the space, supporting recreational use in a similar fashion to a parkland
lake, only a mown edge containing the meadow’s ‘water line’.

A place for sitting, strolling, cycling, exploring, playing, relaxing.

Let it bee.