Anyone who arrives at Green Park, in central London, immediately realizes how the excellent British organization is in everything that surrounds the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, who died on the 8th.
Placing tributes on the door of Buckingham Palace is now prohibited – the volume was too large – and the park, which is next door, has become one of the city’s official spots to pay tribute to the monarch.
What may seem like a detail – what to do, after all, with flowers and cards left by the public? – is actually a carefully planned operation, and there are a number of rules to follow.
Visitors are welcomed in a tent where organizers, with scissors in hand, help to remove the plastic packaging from the arrangements. The public enters a large area surrounded by bars, with entrance and exit in different places, to facilitate the flow. On the lawn, bouquets and cards are piled up, and people manage to stroll among them. Going all the way, calmly, can take hours.
Royal Parks, the organization that takes care of the eight parks in London that officially belong to the royal family, including Green Park, created a manual on its official website with guidelines for those who want to bring tributes. They ask that people respect the demarcated area, give preference to organic and compostable material, do not take balloons or teddy bears.
Cards and letters are welcome – they will be collected and forwarded to the family. Candles are allowed in a separate location covered by sand to prevent fires. There are maps of how to get there and information about the nearest metro stations.
According to Royal Parks, removing the plastic from the bouquets helps the longevity of the flowers and speeds up the composting process of the plants, which will begin between seven and 14 days after the funeral scheduled for Monday (19). The flowers will become fertilizer that will be used in the parks themselves.
In Windsor, the operation is similar. Visitors can still leave flowers on the railings of the castle that was one of Elizabeth II’s official residences and where she will be buried. There, the request for the removal of the packaging is also for safety reasons. Every night, the flowers are x-rayed and taken to the inner garden.
Earlier this week, the sheer volume of plastic waste caught the attention of some London residents, who voluntarily began removing packages and separating them for recycling, which is now done automatically by most visitors.
The British Meghan Naylor, who works for the public health system, the NHS, went to the park with a friend and took a bouquet of sunflowers. Questioned by Sheet if he had thought about the amount of waste generated by the tributes, he said: “I hadn’t thought about it, but now I’m thinking about it. I want to believe that they are responsible for disposing of all this plastic.”
In an informal conversation with the report, a park employee showed a truck that was being filled with packages and assured that everything would be recycled.
There are no official figures on the amount of flowers left. As they are being removed frequently, you won’t see images like at the time of Princess Diana’s death, when bouquets covered the entrance to Kensington Palace, then her residence. An estimated sixty million flowers were left at memorials.
In any case, demand in the last few days has been so high that it was necessary to ask the Turkish producers for help, who are sending stocks by plane so that the shipment arrives in a day, compared to the delay of a week if the journey was made in trucks. . More than 1.5 million flowers are expected to be sent to the UK.
In fact, there are plenty of arrangements on supermarket shelves around Buckingham Palace, which should be among the top sellers until after the funeral.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
