If you’re a charity or community group in Central London, you could decorate your buildings with free flowers from the Royal Parks.

The Royal Parks runs a large garden nursery inside Hyde Park, where they grow all the bedding plants and flowers that decorate the parks and provide the floral displays that fill the space in front of Buckingham Palace.

As insurance against bad weather, they grow more plants than are usually needed. If the weather gods are kind, then that means they have more plants than they can use. So the surplus is given to local community groups each year — and applications for this year are now open.

Applicants must be organisations based in Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, or Camden. They must be either a local charity, a community group supporting people who couldn’t afford to buy plants or non-fee-charging schools.

Successful applicants can collect free plants in June/July and October/November.

The full details and the application form for this year is here. Successful applicants will be informed in late May or early June.

Who knows? With a few minutes spent filling out a form and some nice weather, your community group could be decorated with Royal flowers this year.