A NEW month-long celebration of community-run green spaces is being planned for the summer.

Oxford City Farm, Hogacre Common Eco-Park and more than a dozen other nature nurturing city institutions will join forces to lay on a month of fruit tree pruning workshops, hedgerow trimming, volunteer days and walks in the park.

The groups will be bidding for funding from various pots in the next two weeks so they can properly market Oxford Open Gates festival.

The groups hope that with a combined push on publicity they might also be able to reach new audiences who could benefit from a day out in a green space if only they knew what was out there.

The project is being co-ordinated by Peter Lefort from Oxfordshire’s Community Action Groups (CAG) network.

He said: “We just want to make sure there is no-one who isn’t benefitting from a green space in Oxford.

“We want to find out who wants to use a garden and who needs to know more about what there is.”

Barracks Lane Community Garden in East Oxford, the Westhill Farm project at Shotover Woods, and the Farmability project in Wytham Woods, which provides work opportunities for adults with learning disabilities, will also join the fun.

Good Food Oxford, wild food group Abundance Oxford and the Eat Your School campaign are also among groups which pledged their support to the festival.

The project was born following a series of meetings organised by the CAG and Oxford environmental team-building company The Nature Effect.

They gathered together community-run environmental projects to work out if they could reduce tensions over competing for limited resources, funding and volunteer energy, and instead provide a forum for mutual support.

Mr Lefort said: “In Oxford there are quite a lot of community-run green spaces, but funding is always scarce.

“There is a real danger these projects compete with each other for funding and audiences and it means all the amazing volunteer work put in could be lost.

“The idea with Oxford Open Gates was to work collectively, share funding and hopefully reach a whole new audience.”

The groups are hoping to hold their month-long festival in either June or September.

They are now bidding for funding from cosmetics boutique Lush and others.

Mr Lefort said they had set their sights on a £10,000 budget but would not let a lack of funds stop them from putting on a month of activities.

* The groups hope to announce the dates of their festival in March at cagoxfordshire.org.uk