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.
Map of Living Landscape features
View a map of Living Landscape features across the city from 2019. If you have suggestions for additional sites, please contact us.
Partners
- The City of Edinburgh Council
- Scottish Wildlife Trust
- Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust
- Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
- University of Edinburgh
- Butterfly Conservation Scotland
- RSPB
- NatureScot
View the latest news, project updates and information about our key partners.
The Living Landscape programme so far
Get a detailed review of the programme over the last three years and our plans for the coming season in the evaluation report below.