Meadow Maker

Frome resident Sue Everett is hoping to be part of the next agrarian revolution. She is passionate about restoring wildflowers to our countryside and believes that farmers have an important role to play. Over 98% of British wildflower meadows have been lost since World War 2, largely because of changes in farming practice. Sue works with farmers, and others, to create species rich meadows all over Somerset.

Frome meadow-maker Sue Everett

The sweep of wildflowers at the Olympic Park in 2012 delighted thousands of park visitors and TV viewers of the Games. ‘The Olympic meadows were great,’ says Sue, ‘They planned carefully to create two months of high impact and it looked wonderful. It’s not the same as a meadow of native flowers that has been untouched by chemicals or the plough for many years, but it’s still very pretty!

Meadows are more than fields full of pretty flowers to Sue, though. The love of wildflowers runs deep in many of us but there are practical reasons why we need more meadows. ‘Wildflowers actually help hold the soil in place.’ explains Sue, ‘A meadow of wildflowers and grasses has a dense root system that keeps the soil from washing away in a heavy downpour. Bird’s foot trefoil, which has yellow pea like flowers, can have a root system up to 50cm deep. Rye grass, which we see planted everywhere in fields, has nothing like the same root density.’ It can take up to a five hundred years to produce an inch of top soil, so it is a precious resource that we don’t want washed away during heavy rain.

An annual meadow

Another practical reason for more meadows is to help pollinators. Meadows full of wildflowers are a feast for bees, butterflies and moths. Einstein said that if the bees disappeared, and they have been suffering a serious decline in recent years, mankind would have only have four years of life left. Without bees the flowers will not be pollinated, and without pollination there would be no fruit, tea, soybeans, cotton and many other crops. So more wildflowers is good for us all

We can see a lovely example of an historic meadow near Frome at Edford Meadows, Holcombe, where you can see 90 different flowering plants, including several types of orchid. The Somerset Wildlife Trust owns and manages the meadow. Last autumn the Frome community unsuccessfully tried to purchase Rodden Stream Lake Meadows for public use. Although they have now passed into private ownership, Sue is hopeful that the new owners will safeguard the meadow.

A mature perennial meadow with fine wild grasses

While it’s important to protect existing meadows, Sue is also enthusiastic about creating new meadows – and you don’t need to have a farm to sow a meadow.  ‘I planted a meadow in the front garden of my last home. It started out as a rockery, just a few square metres, and I ended up with nearly 40 species of flowers, grasses and sedges. I have also sown a meadow in my new Frome front garden, and on my shed roof!’

A skipper in a meadow

Meadows are a great way of bringing colour into the garden. They need less maintenance than a traditional lawn, requiring no mowing at all between April and July and less frequent mowing during the other months. It’s not an approach that suits everyone, but, if you like the idea of watching the butterflies dance across the wildflowers in your garden, sowing a meadow could be for you. They are straightforward to establish as long as you follow some simple rules. Sue advises, ‘The trick with meadows is the preparation and the aftercare. This is much the same as planting anything in a garden.’ She has identified 5 common mistakes people make when trying to establish a meado

1. Not eradicating competitive plants prior to sowing seed
2. Using an inappropriate seed mix
3. Sowing at an unecessarily high rate (about 10g per square metre is enough)
4. Not following correct management after sowing
5. Believing that in Year 1 nothing has grown and the scheme has failed (it takes 2 years for most plants to flower), and abandoning it.

Sue can supply a suitable seed mix, as requirements do vary according to the local conditions. ‘It’s not a question of one size fits all – different plants thrive on different soils.’ she says. Wildflower seed mixes are also available in garden centres. Check the packet carefully before you buy, however. Annual flower mixes will only flower once, providing just one summer of interest. Perennials flower for many years but can take longer to get established. A true meadow has wild grasses, as well as flowers. Some packs will contain non-British seeds, which can extend the flowering period. There are many source of advice about creating meadows. Sue recommends the ‘Grassland creation and floral enhancement’ section of the Flora Locale web-site, www.floralocale.org.

A bee orchid in a mature meadow

We are lucky in Frome to have Sue the meadow-maker in our midst. Our farmers, gardeners and local wildlife can only benefit.

sueeverettmeadowmaker.blogspot.co.uk

Planting Woodlands

A few weeks ago I was peering down hundreds of tree protection tubes trying to see if the young ash saplings we planted last winter showed any signs of chalara fraxinea, the fungus that causes ash dieback.  It was a fruitless search with such young trees so late in the season. We won’t know for sure until next year at the earliest, or possibly some years in the future.

Last winter’s planting had been a race against deadlines. The first hurdle had been getting the land registered in time so we could apply for Forestry Commission funding, which requires a fixed period of public consultation. The winter tree planting season is over by the end of March and we had multiple forms to submit before we could order the trees and book the contractors. I thought my problems were over when we finally received the necessary approvals in good time for an early March planting. Then the early spring drought started, and I began worrying about how the young saplings would establish with no rainfall to encourage them. Of course, in the end, lack of rainfall was hardly a problem this growing season and the trees got off to a good start.

'Mindless' tree planting?

So I was feeling pretty pleased about our new wood. It is 4 acres and designed to encourage bio-diversity. We have glades, rides, a good mix of native trees and shrubs and an irregular layout that means it looks very different from regimented timber plantations. Fifteen percent of the trees are ash. I started reading about ash die-back some months ago but thought we would be fine as all our trees were British grown. Then I heard that some growers have been sending tree seedlings abroad to be grown on. So a UK grown label is no guarantee that the tree has not spent time in a foreign nursery. So I began to worry that our lovely wood might lose  fifteen percent of its trees.

And then I started hearing the condemnation of what one commentator called ‘mindless tree-planting’. Around 5 million ash trees have been imported into the UK since 2003 from the continent. Grant schemes have been devised that encourage landowners to plant new woods and the tree nurseries have worked hard to supply the demand for trees. The aim is to reverse the decline in woodland cover in this country. Just after WW2 the percentage of tree cover in England had fallen to six percent. With the encouragement of various schemes, it has now risen to eight percent.

Some commentators claim that this grant-funded tree planting has been ‘mindless’, resulting in ‘dull woodland’ that can actually decrease biodiversity. I would like to see the evidence for this claim. In my experience, the grant schemes’ requirements for improved bio-diversity and sympathy with the landscape are rigorous. The purists assert that we should not be planting saplings, with their doubtful provenance, but wait for woods to regenerate naturally. The climax vegetation for most areas of England is woodland. If you leave a piece of land for long enough, say 50 to 100 years, it will eventually become a wood. Perhaps this is a more ‘natural’ approach that will be guaranteed to produce an authentic, site-specific wood.

It is a very long time, however, since our landscape has evolved without the intervention of man. Almost all natural woods in Britain have been managed for literally thousands of years. Woods are the result of long-running interactions between human activities and natural processes. We learned early on that some trees can re-grow from the stump and this knowledge led to a deliberate management of woods. Woodlands were valuable sources of income. We managed woods for two products: timber for construction and wood for fuel.

The first major human intervention in the original post-glacial wildwood that clothed Britain was by the Neolithic farmers, who arrived about 4.500 BC. During the Bronze Age (2,400-750BC) most wildwood disappeared. Oliver Rackham, whose definitive History of the Countryside is a must-read for those interested in the landscape, estimates that half the wildwood had been felled to create farmland by the early Iron Age (500BC). When the Domesday Book was compiled around 15% of England was covered in trees. The greatest threat to woodland came after WW2 when hundreds of woods were grubbed out for farmland and plantation planting of conifers replaced the older, ‘uneconomic’ woodland.

So while it may be ‘natural’ to increase our tree cover by waiting for natural regeneration of woodland this natural woodland creation hasn’t happened in England, to a significant extent, since the end of the last Ice Age. We have been managing trees for millennia. 

An ancient tree at Stourhead

If we accept that more trees - the right trees in the right place - increase bio-diversity and create beauty in the landscape we need to be pragmatic about the way we will achieve it. Much, not all, tree planting has taken place on private land where the landowner has already taken a long term view by planting saplings. Expecting landowners to wait for natural regeneration to create their woods seems unreasonable.

We have been managing woods for a long time and we have the knowledge, and experience, to do it well. Ash, a native tree, can easily be grown in UK nurseries, although not necessarily as cheaply as abroad. It is a prolific, self-seeder that is fast-growing. Once a resistant strain has been developed, we should be able to grow ample trees to replace the ash-dieback casualties.

Perhaps we need to question the real cost of ‘cheap’ imports when it comes to plants. As fossil fuel becomes more expensive all imports will increase in price. The fact that we live on an island has protected us from pests and diseases for thousands of years. We ignore this natural protection at our peril.

But we shouldn’t condemn genuine attempts to improve the landscape by planting woods just because they don’t comply with some perfect-world conservation scenario. Humans are on this planet to stay. And while we want to touch the earth lightly, we can’t float above it with no impact at all. We should plant woods that suit the needs of nature, and the people that live with them.

Planting for Pollinators

I always thought planting for bees and butterflies was a bit of an oxymoron. Surely flowers and pollinating insects were made for each other? My suspicions were confirmed recently when I attended a fascinating Flora Locale course. I was informed that flowers and their pollinators did, unsurprisingly, evolve together. Flowers evolved to attract pollinators and the insects evolved to suit the flowers. It should not be possible to plant an insect pollinated flowering plant without attracting its natural pollinating insect.

So what happened? Well, we decided that the flowers generously provided by Mother Nature weren’t good enough for us. We wanted bigger flowers, different colours, more petals and many other changes to the original design. In the process of breeding these ‘improved’ plants we often lost original features that attract pollinators. For example, plants with a double flower do not attract pollinators as the second ring of petals reduces the space for the nectaries at which pollinators like to feed. 

Red Admiral buttefly sipping chive nectar

What’s more we went plant-hunting all over the world and imported plants that cannot be pollinated by our native pollinators. These exotic plants are often bird pollinated, for example the climber campsis (trumpet vine) is pollinated by hummingbirds. These plants can be a no-go area to our native bees and butterflies. Not always, however, it depends on similarity of the flower to our native plants. Lavender, which comes from the Mediterranean, is very popular with our native bees.

So what to plant for our native bees, bumblebees and butterflies? Recent publicity has made us all aware of how critical these insects are to our own welfare. According to the charity Buglife, one out of every three mouthfuls of food depends on pollinators. Luckily, it’s not at all complicated. British wildflowers, or their near relatives, are the best, but not only option. Flowers with similar shapes to wildflowers are just as good, as long as they don’t have double flowers.
 If you want to attract a variety of pollinators a variety of flower shapes and flowering times are important. Bees can appear as early as February so early starters like snowdrops are important. Some flower shapes, such as saucer shaped eg geraniums, daisies, scabious and umbellifers eg cow parsley, appeal to a wide range of pollinators while tubular and lipped flowers, eg foxgloves, are more specialist, appealing to bumblebees. North American perennials such as monarda and rudbeckia are good for extending the season.
  Yellow, purple and pink flowers are attractive to pollinators but they can’t see red, although they sometimes are attracted to ultra-violet markings that we can’t see. Food for all life stages is important. So caterpillars should be catered for as well as butterflies. Plant groups of the same flowering plant, not singles. Bees and butterflies like to have a good feed in one area rather than having to fly long distances to find food. This is also a good rule for planting design in general. Odd numbered groups of at least three have much more impact than single, lonely specimens.

Bee enjoying a snack from the non-native Cosmos flower

Above all – don’t use pesticides! Even if you don’t kill the pollinators immediately they build up a lethal level of toxin over a period of time. The general decline of the honey-bee has been linked to pesticides which depress their immune system so they are susceptible to a mite, as well as habitat destruction.

So creating a garden full of buzzy bees and pretty butterflies is relatively straightforward and very rewarding. After all – it’s gardening as nature intended!

www.rhs.org.uk/Gardening/Sustainable-gardening/Biodiversity-and-the-gardener

www.butterfly-conservation.org