This summer, OP and the WWF invite all gardeners (including balcony gardeners) and woodwork lovers to give nature space in their yards, gardens, holiday home grounds or balconies – a square metre at a time.
The idea behind the Grow Wild campaign is simple: provide surface area for nature, by whatever means, and you can tell us how many square metres you gave. See the Alavilliksi.fi website (in Finnish) for a range of tips on how to rewild your yard or balcony.
Your participation can be small or large, from making pollinator-friendly plant choices to turning your whole yard into a managed wilderness. In other words, regardless of whether you’re a novice green fingers or professional gardener, you can join in. Read the easy tips below and feed the number of square metres that you rewild into the calculator on the alavilliksi.fi website.
The Grow Wild campaign is supported by OP Financial Group.
Five easy tips on rewilding:
Don’t mow your lawn. In practice, closely cut grass is a desert for nature. Leaving grass corridors and at least some areas unmown is an easy way of increasing biodiversity in your yard.
Choose pollinator-friendly flowers. Pollinators love plants that produce lots of nectar and pollen. As a rule of thumb, choose colourful flowers with a pleasant fragrance, preferably species that also grow wild in nature.
”Weeds” matter. You can also rewild by allowing so-called weeds to grow, rather than eliminating them to make way for garden plants or a lawn. For example, nettles are a food source for the catterpillars of several butterfly species, such as the small tortoiseshell.
Create a water source for pollinators and other creatures. Water for drinking and bathing is particularly important for pollinators and small creatures during hot weather. Even a dish of water in a suitable place will help.
Don’t spray toxic chemicals. Home gardeners should avoid pesticides and chemical fertilisers, which are harmful to biodiversity. There’s no point in cultivating meadow flowers in a garden corner and spraying poison nearby.We have something in common: nature, which is worth saving
OP Financial Group is Finland’s largest financial services group owned by its customers. Our mission is to promote the sustainable prosperity, security and wellbeing of our owner-customers and business environment. OP Financial Group has around 13,000 employees. We are part of the daily lives of many people in Finland – as a partner in building a sustainable economy and wellbeing. That’s why it’s part of our task to inspire companies, communities and people to combat nature loss.
In the current millennium, biodiversity (the variety of biological species and communities) has collapsed due to human action. As the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss have worsened, people’s understanding has grown of how the economy depends on nature. Over half of the world’s GDP is nature-dependent.
As Finland’s largest financial services provider, we focus on cooperation with the third sector as well as our own and customers’ activities. With the WWF, we want to inspire the whole of Finland to improve local natural environments by rewilding: providing habitats for pollinators and other wildlife. Our partnership supports long-term work aimed at halting biodiversity loss by 2030. Every square metre is precious!
The partnership is one of the actions taken by OP Financial Group as it follows its biodiversity roadmap published in 2023. Our aim is to create a nature positive handprint by 2030. By ‘nature positive’, we mean that our operations will have a net positive impact (NPI) on nature.