Throughout her time with London Wildlife Trust, Elaine supervised the management of their award winning Centre for Wildlife Gardening, CWG, which is a delightful demonstration wildlife garden in East Dulwich. The garden is about a half acre in size and features a series of garden habitats such as a wildflower meadow, living roofs, ponds, planted beds, compost, food growing and herbs, which were managed for optimal biodiversity, sustainable practice and community enjoyment and education. The gardens represented a more traditional view of wildlife gardening and design as a very naturalistic process with measured intervention.
As well as a team of enthusiastic casual volunteers Elaine managed the gardens with a rolling group of trainees of the weekly Centre for Wildlife Gardening Garden Management and Landscape Trainee Scheme that she set up and administrated. It was a weekly hands on project that aimed to show the trainees issues about public and private garden maintenance within a wildlife friendly and sustainable context as well as broader urban biodiversity landscape issues. The group achieved this through class room based teaching, on site practical work, site visits and visiting speakers.