Rolls-Royce is inviting aspiring young designers and naturalists in UK to submit their ideas for a new feature in the Wildlife Garden.
The British automaker is asking children aged 5-11 to suggest features that would enhance the Wildlife Garden and its habitat value to local flora and fauna.
Children can submit their ideas to nurture wildlife, such as pollinator-friendly plants, trees and flowers, bird feeders, bug hotels and nest-boxes. They can also design seats, shelters, sculpture and other items that would make the Garden more appealing.
The Wildlife Garden occupies a small, secluded area of the Goodwood site to the south of The Drive, just inside the main gates. Established as part of the original landscaping when the plant was built in the early 2000s, it provides excellent habitat for a wide variety of plants, insects, birds and animals native to the south of England.
“We established our Wildlife Garden when the Home of Rolls-Royce was first created in 2003, as a dedicated area within our 42-acre site that would be deliberately left in its natural state. Over the intervening years, we have seen changes in approaches to conservation, notably the emphasis on ‘rewilding’ and we wanted to enhance our own project in line with these developments. We also felt it was important to respond to people’s renewed engagement with and concern for local environment, prompted by the pandemic by enhancing the Wildlife Garden’s features and habitats,” Rolls-Royce Motor Cars CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös said.
“We believe it is absolutely appropriate to involve children in this endeavour. Preserving wildlife and habitat really matters to them because it is their future at stake. As our recent international competition to design the Rolls-Royce of the future vividly demonstrated, children see the world with exceptional clarity, imagination and openness; they bring forward ideas that we, as adults, too easily overlook, dismiss or never even consider. I am intrigued to see what they come up with!” he added.
Other frequent visitors to the Wildlife Garden include the inhabitants of the Goodwood Apiary, a colony of around 250,000 English Honey Bees housed in six suitably palatial hives in a secluded location elsewhere on the site. The bees are responsible for producing ‘the Rolls‑Royce of honey’, a rare and exquisite natural bounty reserved exclusively for the marque’s customers and VIP guests.
Rolls-Royce is working with two key partners on the project, which lies close to both the ancient cathedral city of Chichester and the boundary of the South Downs National Park.