Bloom in June
No Mow May is not always a universal favourite.
Terroir south has many neighbours with knee-deep, shaggy, floriferous and colourful vegetation, where once was neat lawn. But others see this land- or garden-scape as long, unkempt and weedy. They bemoan the loss of the great British lawn: green, stripy, easy on the eye, wonderful to sit on and relatively free of fauna which bite or sting. Which side of the garden fence are you on?
But there’s the thing. There is no need for any fencing in this debate. In any garden, public park, common or road verge, there is room for both types of grassland, and for a great deal more in between. It need not be a cultural debate between, on the one hand, the traditional British lawn, parkland or sports pitch (dare we say it, symptomatic of control, status, high maintenance and (deservedly) great pride in horticultural skill) and, on the other hand, the contemporary, species rich, climate change aware, low input, meadow. Historically, both have been with us for centuries, although we would venture to say that the economically valuable hay meadow has probably been around longer than the manicured lawn, or the extensive grass-scape of the English Landscape Park.
Probably the least understood aspect of this debate is maintenance and long term management. Not cutting the grass in spring is a huge attraction which encourages many to start on the road of No Mow May. But the slogan implies that it is OK to start mowing again in June. This is a shame as many meadow-loving flowers bloom in June, July, or August or … . Why restrict ourselves to the flowery beauty of spring alone? Need somewhere to sip that glass of Prosecco or read a book? Cut yourself a sitting space and access path and revel in the summer blooms while you sip and scrutinise your screen. Watch the activities of a whole host of other creatures which also benefit from that ‘relaxed’ attitude to mowing. Know that you are contributing to a healthier planet. Know that varied garden habitats are as crucial to biodiversity as they are in a nature reserve.
But it is also true to say that mowing a short grass lawn is a lot less effort that cutting back something that has been growing unmolested since late winter. Ideally, wildflower meadows need anything between one and three cuts a year, depending on how you want it to develop. In theory, Terroir’s meadows get cut in August/September and possibly again in February, but they are very forgiving if the cuts are late or, occasionally, non-existent. But if you want a bloomin’ meadow, rather than scrubby glades, then at least an annual cut is fairly essential. Holly and oak are particularly invasive in le jardin de Terroir.
So it’s a balance: a quick-ish cut every week or so for that green lawn, or a major hay harvest in late summer. Don’t forget to leave the hay in situ for two or three days, to allow all the seeds to drop back into the sward to enhance next year’s display. Finally, remove the hay to stop it enriching your meadow. Grass loves rich pickings in the soil department so if you want your flowers to get a root-hold, then keep the meadow on a low fertility diet. What to do with the hay? Find someone with guinea pigs or rabbits!
What follows is a tale of three meadows. Two were intentional, but were created in different ways. One is a more rural, recovery area.
Meadow 1 – Terroir’s Mini Meadow
Terroir’s first meadow was created over 20 years ago and although it kept the guinea pigs in hay for many months each year, in other ways it has been somewhat disappointing. We removed the topsoil over the majority of the area and sowed what, at the time, was felt to be a reliable wildflower seed mix. Germination was poor and we probably broadcast the seed too thickly.
As you can see (above right) grasses now dominate, so only the most invasive herbaceous plants can get a foothold – common sorrel (Rumex acetosa) and ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolate) do well, as do a small selection of garden escapes including a purple cranesbill, lungwort (Pulmonaria, probably officinalis) and lady’s mantle (Alchemilla). Bugle (Ajuga reptans) and ox-eye daisy (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) come and go, and this year some ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) has established, but as yet without Cinnabar moth caterpillars to strip it bare. Past highlights have included a hub of ground nesting bees – quite a shock at harvest time and left severely alone once discovered.
In springtime, however, primroses throng a bank under an apple tree and fritillary bulbs, planted around the tree’s trunk, have finally come good with stunning displays before the grasses get too overpowering.
Bizarrely, a persistent specimen of ling (Calluna Vulgaris) clings on from an earlier planting, and colour coordinated Betony (Betonica officinalis) has now colonised this area and spreads each year (both left). The first outliers of the latter have finally reached the main meadow, No. 2.
So Meadow 1 looks fabulous in spring, is good on biomass, but is somewhat underwhelming on biodiversity. Probably time for a change in management.
Meadow 2 – Terroir’s ‘lawn’ conversion
Meadow 2 is only a few year’s old. There was never a classic English lawn here; more a patch of grass which, once no longer required for football and cricket practice, was mown irregularly to maintain some sort of short sward of grass (and moss) for sitting out when the weather allowed. As it is not immediately adjacent to the house, there was no great demand for tables and chairs, Pimms and picnics in this location.
We started the meadow creation by leaving an unmown margin. This was quickly taken over by primroses and bluebells, loving the shady edges on three sides.
Three years ago, we stopped mowing altogether, apart from the creation of some necessary pathways from house to corner seat and from compost heap to a couple of small fruit trees. These routes vary year on year.
The results have been spectacular. The overture is an abundance of massed primroses around the edges, followed by a fanfare of bluebells and an aria of fresh spring green from the grasses. Sidling though the stems is the pale pink of lady’s smock or cuckoo flower, (Cardamine pratensis), then the pert stars of lesser stitchwort (Stellaria gramniea). Soon the plantains begin to provide texture and height as their spear-like flowers raise their heads above the grass parapet. Terroir loves a mixed metaphor.
If you had mowed on the first of June, however, you would have missed so much: the massed displays of ox-eye daisy, the purples of betony and self-heal (Prunella vulgaris), assorted red and white clovers, the yellows of ragwort, nipple-wort (Lantana communis) and cat’s-ear (Hypochoeris radicata), and the delicate white of a young umbellifer, probably wild carrot (Daucus carota).
By now the plaintains are on the march, swaying in the wind like drunken Cossacks or guardsmen, who have exchanged their spears for a slimline version of their traditional headgear of wolf or bearskins.
A new and rather experimental extension to the meadow was seeded last autumn, at the bottom of a slope. This shady area was largely seeded with a woodland/shade mix but the sunny spots received an eclectic mix of all the little packets and bags of assorted ‘wild’ flower seeds which came from everyone’s Christmas stockings over the last two years. The results to date have been a gaudy display of red and yellow: chamomiles, poppies, marigolds and what appears to be scarlet flax (Linum rubrum) (below left).
But it’s not just about gardens. Here is a dispatch from a rural area just north of Wrexham (a place which no longer needs any explanation as to its whereabouts…).
Meadow 3 – ‘just a field’
David writes: 2021/22 saw us with a tenant whose horses were in for somewhat random and, at times, inappropriate periods. The first autumn, they were in for several very wet weeks. As they were both shod, the field soon looked like a WW1 battlefield. Then, when the weather dried for a spell, they were taken off for several more weeks so the lumpiness set solid. However, thank goodness for earthworms etc and my amble today (22nd June) was reasonably smooth.
Late last year the horses were sold and we decided it would be good to let the field have a rest for a couple of years. The motivation for today’s walk was to see if some orchids had survived the equine depredation. They had indeed, though I got the feeling they would have preferred a little less grass. They still seem fairly widespread though and, with the denseness of the grasses, impossible to see except at close quarters.
There are a good variety of grasses and I always think the umbellifers (below left) look like patches of mist amongst the taller grasses.
There was a fair amount of yellow rattle about too (below right). Not much yellow left but plenty of rattle. I gather its hemi-parasitism is useful for weakening the grasses and thus encouraging more flowering plants to grow.
I think the element of my amble that you might have enjoyed the most though was the sheer number of, mostly, Meadow browns. Great crowds of them rising up with every few steps I took. A couple might have been Gatekeepers as there seemed to be a little more orange but that might just have been my eyes and the angle of the sun. I've never seen such a host of butterflies. There were lots of other little flying people but they were bees and, maybe, small moths.
My final pause came as I reached our back hedge gate. I wonder if the old holly berry saw is still valid because, if so, we may have a bad winter ahead.
Thank you David. Terroir suspects, unromantically, that the early mass of holly berries is due to the weather we have just had, rather than what we might expect in the autumn/winter! But your ’just a field’ report is very timely and very cheering.
Walking the Line
As Chris Baines (environmentalist author and campaigner) once said, “Whoever heard of the Society for the Protection of Slugs”?
We are suckers for the eye catching and the beautiful. Take birds: in the UK, the largest nature conservation membership organisation is the RSPB, with over a million members, all prepared to stump up an annual membership fee to protect and enjoy just one small segment of the biosphere. On a global level, we also have the example of the WWF, which started life in 1961 as the World Wildlife Fund, campaigning with huge success under its delightful image of a panda. Although WWF was always committed to ‘protect places and species that were threatened by human development’ (https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/history), it was the panda that caught my attention and imagination, and I am sure I was not alone in that.
Why is this? Why do these appealing species create so much enthusiasm, loyalty and support? Why is there so much less attention given to the world of say amphibians or even wildflowers and so little attention to say, spiders or worms. What follows is purely anecdotal, based on observation, and has no scientific backing, but it seems to me that there are a number of factors.
The first is the teddy bear factor: pandas are cuddly and cute. We fall for them every time. The second is the human perception of wild beauty: I doubt the female blackbird will ever top a bird beauty contest, but there are many other British avian species which take our breath away, an obvious example being the kingfisher. [Stop press: regular followers will be pleased to hear that there is at least one on The Moors, flashing its feathers in fine style].
Thirdly, there is the human perception of wildlife repulsiveness, into which category fall the aforementioned slugs, spiders and worms and may also include close encounters with snakes or ants.
Fourth, and thanks to lockdown, we all know that being outside makes us feel good, and watching something alive and cuddly or beautiful makes us feel even better.
Picture credits, left to right: Kingfisher - Vine House Farm; Wasp spider - © Nigel Jackman 2021; Ant - Maciej; Blackbird - Wildlife Terry
And fifthly, there is the human love of the chase. Call it hunting or list ticking, human beings have been doing this for a very long time: train spotters (gricers), bird watchers (twitchers), butterfly or egg collectors (dodgy), trophy hunters (controversial), sporting hunters (commercial?), wildlife managers (cullers). Much of this love of the hunt has now been channelled into benign pursuits and scientific study but, whether peaceable or more destructive, it has been around a long time - and is a key factor in the growth of the conservation movement. I hesitate to say that it may also be a largely male pursuit, but observation suggests that, in the past, this might be so.
Ironically, the RSPB started, in 1889, as an organisation to stop the trade in feathers and plumes which late Victorians used in lavish quantities to adorn ladies’ hats. The Society consisted entirely of women, and cost tuppence to join. The rules were:
“That members shall discourage the wanton destruction of birds and interest themselves generally in their protection [good to see this first in the list]
That lady-members shall refrain from wearing the feathers of any bird not killed for purposes of food, the ostrich only excepted.” https://www.rspb.org.uk/about-the-rspb/about-us/our-history/
I’m not sure what happened to the ostriches, but some influential ornithologists (men) joined in, the Society grew rapidly, got its Royal Charter and, in 1921, the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act was passed, forbidding the import of plumage to Britain. Result!
But conservation focused on a single species, no matter how attractive or repulsive, was never going to be really effective. The importance of the ecosystem approach, which aims to manage the whole habitat for the good of an appropriate range of species, became increasingly recognised as the way forward. The more habitat-based ‘Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves’ was set up by Charles Rothschild in 1912, but it wasn’t until after WWII that this style of conservation really got going, with the expansion of county Wildlife Trusts, in the 1940s and 50s. This was reinforced by significant legislation, starting with the ground breaking National Parks & Access to the Countryside Act in 1949.
It took until the 1970s, however, before the WWF began to look seriously at holistic habitat protection as well as species specific work, (it kept the Panda logo though) and it was 2010 before the RSPB started its ‘landscape scale’ conservation programme, and 2013 before ‘Birds’ magazine became ‘Nature’s Home’. Oh, and another black and white cuddly image (of a badger) became the Wildlife Trusts poster animal from 2002.
Conservation organisations which concentrate on single species or species groups still thrive however, including The Bat Conservation Trust, Buglife, The Mammal Society, and Plantlife (wild flowers, plants and fungi) to name a few. Typically memberships are in the thousands or tens of thousand, however, and the RSPB still leads the way in terms of sheer size.
How do these organisations cope with habitat wide issues? Let’s take a look at Butterfly Conservation, a classic in terms of life-affirming study of beautiful creatures, with the added bonus that those creatures tend to grace our landscapes in the warmer months and during daylight hours. In addition, there are only 59 butterfly species in the UK (depending on how you count) compared to 3,000 or so moth species, which makes the annual challenge of seeing them all much more achievable. Happy hunting.
Adons Blue Butterfly
© Richard Stephens 2021
Butterfly Conservation (BC) has four very laudable aspirations and I hope they will forgive me for my ‘holistic habitat approach’ comments:
Conservation - including the recent Brilliant Butterflies Project, a partnership between BC, London Wildlife Trust, Natural History Museum and funded by a Dream Fund Award (Post Code Recovery Fund/Lottery). Sounds good: specialist knowledge teamed with area based knowledge.
Reserves – BC owns over 30 reserves around the UK ranging from Devon to Norfolk and the Scottish Highlands, all managed for the benefit of the butterfly/moth home team. Terroir needs to know more on the management issues before commenting.
Recording – including some seriously useful Citizen Science (see below).
Education – many, many field visits for BC’s local membership groups (this is serious butterflying with, in Terroir’s experience, only a smattering of wider habitat input!) (and yes, a few women attend!). Also initiatives such as a ‘Munching Caterpillars’ programme for Primary schools; I assume this is more along the lines of Eric Carle’s ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ than an Australian bush craft diet for the stranded human.
Why would you not want to come out and look at these beauties? Their names are as picturesque as their wing formations. But their context is important too: why are they there, what do they feed on, what do their caterpillars feed on, do they cohabit with equally important but less beautiful plants and animals which are also deserving of conservation?
Terroir’s favourite Butterfly Conservation activity centres on the citizen science end of things - knowing what is going on is key to understanding just about anything. BC has set up a series of transects – fixed lines through all types of habitat - which are walked weekly by enthusiastic members, between April and September. Whoever is walking the line, records butterfly sightings (species and numbers) according to a standard set of rules. The data is then uploaded onto The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) website (https://www.ukbms.org/ ). It is then available to those who, one hopes, can interpret the trends and offer appropriate conservation management advice. There are over 3,000 monitored sites and transects across the UK with over 100 butterfly transects in the Surrey and South West London branch area, alone.
The Box Hill/Dukes transect in Surrey crosses chalk downland, and up to 33 butterfly species have been recorded there by the line walker. Thankfully, this site is owned and managed by the National Trust, who have the tricky job of trying to balance the needs of butterflies with the needs of the species rich chalk grasslands, of reptiles, of birds, of arachnids, of archaeology, of history and, not least, of the many human beings who exercise (pun alert) their ‘right to roam’ across these open access areas, to walk their dogs, improve their health and lift their spirits.
The images below show just a small selection of the butterflies recorded on the Box Hill/Dukes transect.
So, is there a role for all these different types of wildlife and conservation organisations? Of course there is, specialist knowledge is always valuable, but there is also a constant need to adapt to changing circumstances and to listen to the views of others, whether scientific or social. Just as the WWF and RSPB adapted their approach to conservation, so species experts like BC are having to adapt their approach to banging their particular butterfly, bug or bat drum.
At the moment partnership is vital, as exemplified by BC’s collaboration with holders of a different sort of specialist knowledge such as the London Wildlife Trust, the British Museum or the National Trust. No organisation is, or should try to be, an island.
Don’t forget to log your own wildlife sightings on iRecord (https://www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/ ), and yes, I know, yet another recording website.
And if you join Butterfly Conservation, and start transect walking, remember Johnny Cash’s immortal lines:
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line
He was referring to his wife, not to his passion for butterflies. The butterfly widow is not yet extinct.