Tag Archive for: wellbeing

Wellbeing and wilderness

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Wellbeing and wilderness: It may have been the 15th British Open hosted at prestigious Royal St George’s in Sandwich, Kent, but for the greenkeeping team headed up by course manager Paul Larsen, the 149th Open was an extraordinary and unique event.

Set in the dunes of the Kentish coastline and bisected with swathes of naturalistic grasses and wildflowers, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in a nature reserve, not one of the most famous and prestigious golf courses in the world. Yet for Paul, showcasing the natural beauty of the area was a top priority.

Wellbeing and wilderness

Wellbeing and wilderness

Paul comments: “We have amazing views and a unique position as a golf course within a dune land. We made a conscious decision some years ago to move away from the typical golf course with its striped lines and focus on enhancing what makes us special. We brought it back to what it used to be – more wild and natural – and having The Open here has been an opportunity to show people what we’ve been doing.

“When you’re preparing for an event of this magnitude, for us it’s not about modifying the course, adding new holes or making changes to greens and bunkers. It’s about doing what we always do but more regularly and without room for mistakes. We take such pride in our work and were excited to showcase our product.”

Supporting Paul was his resident 16-strong greenkeeping team boosted by the help of two support teams totalling a further 34 greenkeeping specialists from other golf courses both locally and around the UK. Work started at 4am each day and the teams were responsible for hand-cutting the greens, cutting the fairways, tees and aprons and raking the bunkers, all on a daily basis.

In order to sustain such a large greenkeeping resource, Reesink Turfcare, the sole Toro distributor in the UK for golf and sports fields equipment and irrigation products, produced a loan fleet from Toro, global leaders in turfcare machinery to bolster the Toro Reelmaster fairway mowers, Groundsmaster rough mowers, Greensmaster TriFlex Hybrid riding greensmowers and Greensmaster Flex walk-behind greensmowers machines already on site.

As a Toro Total Solutions customer, the machines complement the Toro Lynx Central Control System and over a thousand sprinklers across the greens, tees and fairways.

For Paul, having the support from Reesink and Toro is something he is “so grateful for”. Paul elaborates: “There’s no blueprint for hosting The Open in a pandemic. It’s a unique experience so having the support of the extra fleet from Toro made our job easier, enabling us to double our capacity and help everyone to perform at the top of their ability.”

When asked about dealing with the pressures of hosting a major sporting event in the midst of a pandemic Paul is characteristically pragmatic about it: “There’s no doubt that the pandemic gave us some logistical challenges such as getting staff tested and managing teams to avoid social contact.

“The adrenaline does flow but there’s no secret to getting it right. We just focused on our work. We’d put all the right preparations in place so at the end of the day my view was ‘you’ve got what you’ve got’.

“The nature of our work is always reactive, and we adapted constantly whether it was to the weather or changes in regulations. We were resilient and worked incredibly hard. The players and spectators loved the course and we’ve had feedback from members of the sporting press saying it was one of the best Opens they’d seen.”

Having welcomed up to 32,000 visitors per day, the course is currently awaiting a full assessment from Paul and his team. Paul elaborates: “At the end of August when The Open is fully off site we will be able to assess the course and the extent of the damage from footfall. I expect there’ll be some areas that require reseeding or new turf. We may have to burn some areas of the rough to regenerate it but essentially it’ll be routine maintenance.”

In Paul’s ten years working at Royal St George’s, the 2021 British Open was one of the highlights of his career, particularly making such a major success of the event in a pandemic.

Paul concludes: “The biggest achievement? It was definitely keeping everyone safe. It was a pleasure to welcome spectators back to the sport safely and hear the excitement from the crowd. You could feel the energy and it was a fitting end to all our hard work.”

To talk to someone about how the Toro range would suit your course, call Reesink Turfcare on 01480 226800.

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Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

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Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing: Mental Health Awareness Week, organised by the Mental Health Foundation, runs each year from the 10th to 16th of May. This year’s theme of ‘Nature’ is particularly poignant with lockdown restrictions easing and people once again allowed to socialise at both indoor and outdoor locations.

The emotional wellbeing benefits of nature have been researched extensively over the years and, as Paul Bean from grounds maintenance specialist Nurture Landscapes Group explains, it is important to keep these in mind all-year-round, especially as the world looks to recover from Covid-19.

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Research[1] commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation and the UK World Wildlife Fund (WWF-UK) published ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week found that 62% of people felt that taking a walk helped improve their mental wellbeing during the pandemic.

Now that we are starting to look ahead to the post-Covid world, outside spaces will continue to be areas of comfort. That, of course, means caring for these areas so that they can provide the respite people are looking for.

‘Caring’, in this context, includes small individual actions that each person can take in their day-to-day lives, such as taking litter home, to carrying out more extensive grounds maintenance and improving sustainability practices, such as using energy-efficient equipment when tending to a park’s upkeep.

There is also a lot to be said for creating a space that the local community feel proud to have on their doorstep, achieved by hosting events around biodiversity and environmental awareness.

Urbanised areas in particular can see the benefits of opening up more natural spaces in these ways, especially as the various lockdown measures highlighted the need for improved access. According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, only 13% of residents across urban areas in England and the three most populous cities in Wales lived within a ten minute walk of a local park, and of those who did have good access, nearly a quarter (24%) suggested the park was at risk of becoming too overcrowded.[2] Yet before the first lockdown in March 2020, 93% of respondents had visited a green space in the year leading up to movement restrictions being implemented.

Improving natural areas to create a quiet haven in an otherwise stressful and at times, overwhelming setting, doesn’t happen overnight. However, choosing the right plants, flowers, and even the positioning of benches, are good first steps. Then, of course, there is the ongoing TLC which keeps the park looking at its best.

The message of taking care of the natural environment for our own emotional wellbeing is a key one for Mental Health Awareness Week this year, and something we at Nurture Landscapes take great pride in being able to facilitate. While we may not be experts in mental health, we do understand and appreciate how important it is for people to have a space where they can take some time to care for themselves.

And the signs that this will continue to be the case are there already, with offices looking to utilise outdoor meeting areas, such as the one we use ourselves at our head office in Surrey (pictured), and nature charities reporting greater interest in their respective activities, according to ONS data.[3]

The same data reveals that during the summer of 2020, the use of #m_2362510770876043122__ftn3outdoor spaces surged when compared to Natural England’s baseline figures from the period 2010 to 2018, peaking at a 100% increase in August of last year. Good weather and the temporary lifting of restrictions will certainly have been key factors for this dramatic increase, but the understanding and awareness of nature that people developed in the months spent in lockdown will have also contributed.

Before the virus outbreak, when long commutes and crowded urban areas were considered ‘the norm’, going for a walk to clear the mind or get some fresh air out of a busy office provided a welcome respite from the constant pressures of modern living. Covid-19 showed us just how important those five minutes out in the fresh air truly are.

As Mental Health Foundation’s Thriving in Nature report states, “nature is for everyone [and] it is essential that everyone can access nature whatever their circumstances”.[4] To fulfil this vision, and ensure that the post-pandemic era has a strong focus on taking care of our own individual mental health needs, opening up natural spaces and maintaining them to create green oases in what can be an overwhelming world needs to be a priority, especially with nearly half of people in the UK noticing the increasing benefits of nature on their overall mental wellbeing.

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