Verge persuades councils to cut road verges twice a year instead of eight times, and records what comes back. The identity is made of plants, and the plants are not decoration: each is a species outline drawn at its true height relative to the others. You cannot resize one to balance a layout, because the height is a fact about the plant.
The word with a strip of planting beneath it, cut through as a survey would draw it. The species in the strip change with the season; the section line never does.
Primary lockup, June planting
Every outline is drawn from one height table. Switch species in and out: the drawing recomposes, but no plant is ever scaled to fit. The tall ones are tall.
Muted and printed rather than glowing. The palette is chosen so that two colours overlapping in a riso print make a third that is still in the palette.
#7C8B6AFoliage and the ground. The most-used colour by area, deliberately the quietest.#B4553AAnything that has to be noticed: dates, the cutting months, the ask.#DFA53AFlower heads only. Never a background, never a panel.#4F5C41Stems, the written hand, and any button. Reads as ink at small sizes.A geometric sans does all the work. A single handwritten line per artefact carries the aside, the thing a volunteer would have said, and never carries information.
A campaign poster, a seed packet, a verge-side board, a card and the site. The plants on each are the ones growing there that month.
Two cuts a year turned 11 species into 62 on the A420. Ask your council for the schedule.
Campaign poster, A2
Card, 85 × 55 mm
Seed packet, 90 mm square
Plot 14. Last surveyed June 2026: 41 flowering species.
Verge-side board, 400 × 300 mm
The A420 survey, four years, both cutting schedules, all of it downloadable.
See the dataWebsite
The audience is a highways officer with a mowing contract, not a supporter. Everything written is a count, a month or a cost, because those are the things that change a schedule.
Two cuts instead of eight. 62 species instead of 11.
Two numbers, both from the survey, both checkable.Let nature flourish in our communities.
Nothing in it can be done on a Tuesday by a person with a mower.Six cuts saved is about £1,400 a mile a year.
Puts the argument in the currency the decision is actually made in.Together we can build a greener future.
Could be any charity, so it recruits nobody and persuades no officer.This style collapses into greetings-card the moment the drawing stops being a measurement. Four ways it goes, and the first is the one that empties it.
Verge is invented, built as a portfolio exercise in the solarpunk and eco-optimist look. Bristol, the A420 and the species named are real; this charity, its surveys, figures and staff are not, and no number here should be read as a real count. The visual language is after the riso-printed charity and community work of about 2020 onward. Those designers are credited as influences only. Part of the One Rule Each series.
Every plant is drawn at its true height relative to every other plant. The scale may change; the ratios never do.