Say GO to the mow!

Dr Trevor Dines
Plantlife Botanical Specialist


I’m standing in a meadow in Sussex on the hottest day of the year. The July sun is doing a good job of bleaching the scene but, even this late in the season, the straw-brown field is punctuated with colour; deep purple betony (Stachys officinalis) with its short, fat flower spikes and tall Devils’-bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis) throwing blue discs above the grasses. At my feet, yellow Lady’s-bedstraw (Galium verum) is sprawled through the sward, reminiscent of its former use to sweeten the scent of straw-stuffed mattresses.

The sound is incredible too, the myriad of crickets, grasshoppers, hoverflies and bees reminiscent of a tropical rainforest. But walking through the meadow creates another sound too. The pods of Yellow-rattle (Rhinanthus minor - image right) are ripe – dry, swollen and fat with seeds that rattle under every footstep. Traditionally, Lammas Day, the 1st August, was the day to start cutting hay cut, the first harvest of the year. But farmers would instead often be guided by Yellow-rattle, the rattling a signal to farmers that the hay was ready to cut.

It can feel like an horrific act of brutality to cut down a meadow in its prime, but in fact it is the single most important point in the annual meadow cycle. It provides valuable fodder and bedding for livestock, it removes nutrients from the field, keeping soil fertility down and allowing more delicate flowers to thrive, and it keeps brambles, bracken, saplings and other thuggish plants in check. If it wasn’t for the hay cut, meadows would quickly revert to scrub and woodland, losing much of their colour and wildlife along the way.

All over the country, meadows are resonating not just with the sounds of wildlife but with tractors, mowers, hay turners and bailers. As well as providing a valuable farm income, this green hay is also being used to literally seed new meadows. The sites for these will have first been cleared and lightly cultivated, just enough to break up the soil surface. Green hay is then taken from a good, ancient, flower-rich meadow nearby and transported to the new fields where it is strewn and then either rolled or grazed by cattle. In this way, all the seed from the plants in the hay drops into the soil, ready to germinate with the first rains. The results can be spectacular, with apparently ancient meadows, full of the flowers characteristic of the local area becoming established in just two or three years. As part of the Coronation Meadows project, 12 such meadows were recreated in 2013, and over 120 hectares of restoration are planned this year.

Volunteers from local communities all over the UK are involved, helping out with both cutting and spreading green hay. Scything courses have become popular, this traditional form of mowing providing a tough work-out. In some cases, seed of special flowers, such as Melancholy Thistle (Cirsium heterophyllum) and Dyer’s Greenweed (Genista tinctoria), are being collected and grown to plant out in local meadows next year. Artists are capturing the action of the hay-cut, as well as the beauty of the meadows themselves, and sound-recorders are capturing that cacophony of meadow music that’s so much part of the meadow experience.

So, from now on it’s essential that we say GO to the mow! Not just in meadows, either:

• If you’ve left a patch of grass unmown in your lawn, you can give it a good trim. Attack it with a strimmer or pair of shears, remove the growth and then mow the grass hard back. Treat it like a normal lawn until Christmas and then leave the same patch to grow back next year. Managed this way, the number of species and flowers is likely to increase.
• Our flower-rich roadside verges are meadows too. As part of our Road Verge Campaign, we’re asking Local Councils to start mowing the entire width of their verges now and remove clippings where possible. If you see verges being cut for the first time now, they might have signed up to our Campaign. If not, or if they’ve been cut already, why not lend your signature to our petition?

Kicking my way through the meadow, another sound can be heard. A tractor pulls into the field with mower in tow. The farmer engages the machinery and sets to work, the tall grass reduced to strips of hay in an instant. It looks so destructive as the stunning meadow is turned to an apparently nondescript agricultural field. But this hay will soon be taken from here and put to good use. I pick some up and give it a shake. My palm and fingers are showered with the precious seed, yellow-rattle in particular. I hold a new meadow in my hand.