Why purple crocuses are going in at Hayle Recreation Ground

Come spring, one corner of a Cornish recreation ground should turn purple. The colour was picked for a reason, and that reason starts thousands of miles away.

The gardening team at Hayle Town Council and members of the Rotary Club of Redruth have been planting crocus corms at the Recreation Ground in Hayle, as part of Rotary’s ‘End Polio Now’ campaign.

Why purple?

The purple crocus is a symbol of Rotary’s worldwide campaign to eradicate polio.

Its colour represents the dye used to mark the finger of a child who has been immunised.

📷Credit: Hayle Town Council

Millions of corms across Britain and Ireland

Hayle’s patch is one small part of a much bigger planting effort. In more recent years, Rotary has worked with RHS Britain in Bloom, local gardening groups and others to plant millions of purple crocus corms across Great Britain and Ireland to raise awareness.

More on the campaign is on the End Polio Now website.

Three decades of work

Rotary has been working for over 30 years to rid the world of polio, a disease that can kill or severely disable children.

Over the course of the campaign it has helped immunise more than 2.5 billion children and helped reduce the number of polio cases by 99.9%.

When it began, cases were found in 125 countries around the globe. Now just two remain polio endemic. Afghanistan and Pakistan.

📷Credit: Hayle Town Council