Edinburgh Living Landscape

Nature in your neighbourhood

The Edinburgh Living Landscape is a partnership project that creates, restores and connects green areas of the city to make attractive and biodiverse landscapes. Landscapes will be healthy, nature rich and resilient to climate change.

How a Living Landscape looks

Edinburgh Living Landscape means changes to how some of our outdoor spaces will look. The project involves measures such as

creating annual and perennial meadows
reducing how often some areas of grass are cut and allowing natural grassland to thrive
mowing pathways through areas of longer grass so they can still be explored and enjoyed
planting trees and creating woodlands
increasing our use of herbaceous perennial planting
planting bulbs.

View additional examples on Edinburgh Collected.

Benefits of Living Landscapes

Allowing grassland habitats to develop in a more natural manner in urban settings by reducing grass cutting or sowing flowering plants offers

increased biodiversity as birds, mammals and insects are attracted to wilder or more natural areas
reduced costs of maintained areas of grassland
added colour to the cityscape as we plant flowering species
a reduction in CO2 release due to less cutting, which also helps lock-up carbon in soils.