Showtime for Wildflowers

Dr Trevor Dines
Plantlife Botanical Specialist





I was a botanist on a mission: find as many native plants as possible. With show gardens, a massive Floral Marquee and loads of nurseries, the RHS Malvern Spring Festival appeals to both the ordinary gardener and the plantaholic. It’s a good way of seeing what, horticulturally, is in vogue each year and I was there to discover how our native flora fares against the rest of the world.

A few years ago, there was a trend for native plants in “wildlife” gardens. Designers were using them as statements in their gardens, a way of challenging the norm. These days, our native flora is finding more of a natural home in the designs, being woven through the tapestry of the garden rather than a tick-box “this is our wildflower bit”.

So, winner of “Best Festival Garden” was an exquisite little formal garden by designers Ana Mari Bull and Lorenzo Volpini of LSV Gardens & Associates. Striking cloud-clipped hornbeam bushes lined a central path flanked by geometric blocks of planting, with native box alternating with softer ragged-robin, white wood crane’s-bill and tufted hair-grass. Mixed in with these were non-natives including dame’s-violet and snowy woodrush. I loved the way natives species featured strongly, but as an integral part of the design and not as a gimmick.

Ragged-robin (pictured left) was actually a bit of a star of the whole show. In the floral marquee, I found it featured it many nursery displays, the wild pink form sitting alongside the sublime white variety ‘White Robin’ and the double ‘Jenny’ (this one rather garish to my eyes, but fine if you like bright pink pom-poms). White was a theme too; Hardy’s Cottage Plants paired frothy woodruff with a white herb Robert under a canopy of solomon's-seal with its hanging ivory bells (pictured below right).

Not surprisingly, the fern nurseries drew heavily on our native fern heritage. In Fibrex Nursery’s bold display, it was good to see magnificent native royal ferns holding their own alongside tropical tree ferns. Beneath them grew a plethora of varieties of male fern, soft shield fern and lady fern, the latter including ‘frizelliae’ with its bizarre, tiny, alternating fronds.

I was particularly pleased to see the Alpine Garden Society display, one of their competitive events in which members growing skills are put to the test. Among the various categories I spotted dwarf birch ‘Glengarry’, several stunning pots of Dickie’s bladder fern (which originates from a single cave in Aberdeenshire) and, my personal highlight, a large clump of lady’s slipper orchid with a dozen pristine blooms.

For me, the show encapsulated the many ways in which gardeners engage with native plants. I loved the common alongside the rare, the formal alongside the informal, and the perfect alongside the imperfect. All were welcome and all had a part to play alongside plants from around the world.

We had a plant of bastard balm on the Plantlife stand at the show. It really drew an audience, its flowers looking like rude faces with pink tongues sticking out. Those that knew it were often surprised to learn it’s a rare native species and of our work to conserve it. This is the aim of The Wildflower Garden, to celebrate our native flora and make connections between gardens and wild flowers. Many of them are rather wonderful garden plants.

• Read Trevor's Top Tips on how to grow wild flowers on Plantlife's Wildflower Garden website.

Why Our Road Verge Wildflowers are Worth Saving for Wildlife

Andy Byfield
Landscape Conservation Manager





For a few short weeks in May, the great outdoors turns a vibrant, almost claustrophobic green.  Oak, beech and sycamore are in fresh young leaf, whilst the grasses of pastureland and arable field alike seemingly burgeon before our very eyes.  With so much herbage all around, the environment should be in fine fettle, yet so often those same green fields are largely devoid of wildlife, save for a fine sward of ryegrass, and the occasional weed in a gateway.  Their former life and colour has literally been swamped by the repeated dosing of fertilisers and weedkillers.

At the same time, our best road verges give an inkling of just how colourful our countryside used to be. Down here in the south-west of England, a ‘technicolour dreamcoat’ of bluebell, red campion, greater stitchwort, buttercup and early purple orchid are at their glorious best as I write these words, and as the season progresses, so these will be replaced in turn by marsh orchid, ox-eye daisy and much else.  In fact, our verges can be seen as a microcosm of Britain’s hugely varied habitats and landscapes, providing dry and wet rocky outcrop, fine turf,heath, scrub and woodland, often in surprisingly short succession.

Thus verges in Hampshire harbour gleaming long-leaved helleborines and other woodlanders, mimicking the vegetation of nearby woodland; in East Anglia, the likes of rarities such as field wormwood, grape hyacinth and perennial knawel on Breckland verges are a reminder of the summer-dry continental climate of this peculiar corner of England; whilst globeflower, melancholy thistle and wood cranesbill crammed verges of northern England and Scotland are a glimpse of the former glory of our lost upland haymeadows. Apparently, roughly two-thirds of our flowering plants crop up somewhere or other along a wayside.  Its a sad fact, but as the wider countryside has lost its meadows and heathlands, so our verges become an ever more important haven for plants and animals, the unofficial nature reserves of cliché.

Of course, in the distant past – before my time even! – wayside verges were grazed by livestock and doubtless cut as a bonus crop of hay, yet in the sixties and seventies, I remember when the exuberant May-time verge-side herbage were routinely ‘dampened’ with a liberal dose of weedkiller.  In more enlightened times, the sprays have largely gone and the conservation movement has been effective in identifying special stretches as protected verges, perhaps to conserve some rare butterfly or orchid, or a particularly flowery grassland.  These latter efforts have unquestionably saved some of our finest surviving verge habitat, but it seems to me that the time has come to make sure that all verges are managed sympathetically, not just the best.  After all, the 2013 State of Nature report showed that 60% of our rarer plants and animals continue to decline, confirming the findings of Defra’s 2010 review of England’s wildlife sites, Making space for nature.

In it, the panel’s chair, Professor Sir John Lawton, commented that there “is compelling evidence that England’s collection of wildlife sites are generally too small and too isolated, leading to declines in many of England’s characteristic species”. According to Lawton, the solution lies in ‘bigger, better and more joined-up’ habitats for biodiversity, recognising the real benefits that ecological corridors could have in allowing nature to thrive.  I cannot think of any way of linking our landscapes together, than bringing good management to our stock of road verges.

The area of vergeland habitat in Britain is equivalent to the area of the Public Forest Estate in England – a thrillingly large resource if managed properly.  And there is plenty of evidence that with good management, verges can rapidly develop stunning, flower-rich habitats, with a bounty of insect life in tow, in a surprisingly short time under such management.

True, the budgets available to our highways authorities – the Highways Agency and the county councils – is more restricted than ever before, but sympathetic management could involve as little as shifting the mowing dates by just a few weeks.  It is great that Plantlife is relaunching its road verge campaign this month – and we’d love it if you join our campaign, alongside our generous celebrities, in encouraging our councils to cherish this invaluable wildlife resource.

Useful links:

• Plantlife Road Verge Campaign

Setting Up a No-Mow Zone.

Luke Morton
Plantlife Moderator





"Never ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself" said Eleanor Roosevelt and with that advice in mind, I have decided to take Plantlife's Say No to the Mow challenge by making a No-Mow Zone in my own back garden.

For those who have not heard of it, Say No to the Mow is a bit like a botanical Movember: both involve allowing a hirsute patch to flourish where normally you'd keep it cropped short. But instead of the hair on your upper lip, Plantlife is asking you to spare a small "No-Mow Zone" of lawn from your mower's blades this summer. Then as it begins to flourish, you can download a free ID sheet featuring fourteen key wild flowers and enter which ones you spot online. The results will form a blooming great map of the UK, showing what’s in flower and when.

But first things first: Where should I put my No-Mow Zone? Plantlife botanist (and passionate gardener) Dr Trevor Dines suggested choosing a spot away from the beds.

The grass here has not been mowed since last autumn. As a rule of thumb, the longer its been since you last mowed your patch the more likely you'll get wildflowers. March is a key cut-off month as plants are beginning to sprout for the spring, so any mowing that occurs later could stop some in their tracks.

Now I need to mark it out. Here's what I'll need:

There's no limit to the size or shape of your No-Mow Zone. You could make it the entire lawn or spell out your name. We say the ideal size for a No-Mow Zone is 2m squared, but as I've only a small garden I'm opting for 1m x 1m. Using the tape measure I place a peg at each corner:

With the pegs in place I then apply some string to keep that hungry mower at bay...

A finishing touch: my No-Mow Zone security guard. Would you mess with a gnome like this?

And there it is! Ready to flourish.

Next stop downloading my free ID sheet and adding what pops up to the online map which of the wildflowers pop up.

Joining me and my gnome in Saying No to Mow? We'd love to hear how you're getting on. Share your stories, sightings and photos with us on Twitter adding #saynomow.

• Find out more about Say No to the Mow

Blooming marvellous

Luke Morton

Plantlife Moderator

It might not officially be the first day yet but (whisper it quietly) spring has arrived! Or at least that seems to be the case going by the plethora of gorgeous wildflower photos you've been tweeting us over the last few weeks. Indeed, our wildflowers do appear to be blooming earlier this year and for that you can thank the mild winter. For while we've had the wettest winter on record, much of the UK has barely felt a frost. Celandines, primroses, violets and wild daffodils have all been appearing ahead of schedule. Here's a couple of photos from our Bloomwatch board:

Primroses flowering in Mull posted by @glengormcastle:

Butterbur with a visiting bee, posted by @floodenheim - better known as Peter Q D Flood, drummer with Folk band Bellowhead.

Please keep them coming!

So what will be blooming on this blog over the next few weeks? Well...

• Sue our Wildflowers Count Coordinator will be celebrating the first day of spring.
• Ali from our Scotland team will be buzzing about Plan Bee: our work with the Co-operative to bring wildflowers to urban spaces. 
• At end of the month a ban on five non-native, invasive plants comes into effect - Nicola, our Head of Conservation will explain why this is something we (successfully) campaigned for followed by Dr Trevor Dines' thoughts on how and why we distinguish the bad plants from the good.

In the meantime, if you have a lawn don't forget to Say No to the Mow. See you soon!

Save Our Magnificent Meadows

Posted by Nicola Hutchinson, Head of Conservation Programmes, England and Wales.

If you happen to see fireworks around the Plantlife HQ it isn’t just because of we like to celebrate the Chinese New Year – it’s because the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has this past week agreed to fund a grassland programme of unrivalled scale.  It is the first time that the HLF's UK committee has considered a natural heritage bid - usually environment projects are decided on by HLF at regional level - so this is totally new territory for the HLF, and for Plantlife, and a resounding achievement for the hard work over several years that goes into submitting a bid of this ambition.

Save Our Magnificent Meadows is a £3million programme of meadow and other grassland conservation, with community and people engagement at its heart, to be delivered across the UK.  It is headed up by Plantlife, with the following partners: Ulster Wildlife Trust, RSPB Scotland, Scottish Wildlife Trust, Northumberland Wildlife Trust, National Trust in Wales, Cotswolds Conservation Board, Somerset Wildlife Trust, RSPB in Wiltshire, Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, and the Medway Valley Countryside Partnership (Kent CC). The project partners are a mighty bunch who have worked long and hard to work out the best approach to the most important grassland needs in their areas, and we are all thrilled.  For the conservation of grassland plants and other wildlife this is incredible news. It is an amazing opportunity for our grassland wildlife, so often the 'Cinderellas of the conservation world' - talked about in terms of extreme loss and decline but often overlooked in the wake of higher profile habitats such as woodlands and wetlands. This time they have a chance to go to the Ball!

The key to Save our Magnificent Meadows is that it isn't simply a series of independent local projects, rather there is a strong nationwide programme of activities to link local activities and to take the message as wide as possible.  The project has received £2.1million from the HLF and will begin in Spring 2014 for three years.  We will work with landowners to restore and create wildlife-rich grasslands; we will directly safeguard over 3000 ha of our most vulnerable grassland habitats and influence the management of a further 3000 ha. Crucially, the project will foster greater understanding of the values of meadows and grasslands by landowners, communities and wider society with over 550,000 people expected to participate.

I've spent the past few days spreading the news and thanking the many people who have helped bring this incredible opportunity to life.  My hope is that one day the sights and sounds of wildlife-rich meadows and grasslands will again be a familiar summer experience for the many and not just the few as it sadly is today.

We’ll keep you updated of events as they happen via this blog, our website, Facebook and Twitter.

A Bumper Year for Blackberries

Posted by Richard Moyse, Ranscombe Farm Reserve Manager

At Plantlife's Ranscombe Farm Reserve, the wood-edges and path-sides are fat with blackberries as the summer draws towards its close. The first fruits are already temptingly glossy and black, while behind them the mass of tight, green unripe berries suggests a bumper harvest yet to come.

It looks like it's going to be a great year for our favourite wild fruit. Perhaps it's just the pleasure of a classic British summer showing us everything through rose-tinted glasses, but I think not. The last year's dullness and wet may have made for poor flowering and fruit production, but it provided good growing conditions for a whole range of wild plants. As a result, when the good weather arrived, there was plenty of energy to put into making flowers.

Earlier in the year, Ranscombe's woodlands were a mass of living colour, as orchids and other flowers had a jamboree. That the brambles were also fit and vigorous was obvious in midsummer, as their prickly, arching stems romped across paths and tracks, making it necessary to be out with the strimmer much earlier than in most years. Brambles are nothing if not mobile: questing stems spread out from the centre of the plant, and, where the stem-tips touch the ground, they root to eventually form a tangled, impenetrable mass.

Impenetrable to us, that is, for the dense, thorny cover is a great place for nesting birds such as wrens and long-tailed tits, as well as for small mammals. Young trees, too, if not completely swamped, can grow up through the bramble patch, safely protected from the predations of deer.

The other key to the mobility of brambles is, of course, the thing we love most about them: blackberries. The sweet, juicy berries (more accurately, a blackberry isn't technically a berry, but an aggregrate of many small fruits called drupelets, each with a single seed) are eaten by blackbirds, thrushes and other birds, which unwittingly carry and eventually pop out the seeds some at distance from the parent plant. The droppings in badger latrine pits are often stained dark at this time of year, as the animals fill themselves with as many blackberries as they can find, and the fruit is also popular with foxes, voles, mice and dormice. Even insects like butterflies and wasps will come to damaged fruit to sip at the juices.

It's known that Neolithic people ate blackberries around 5000 years ago, so going blackberrying to make jam, or blackberry vinegar or (a personal favourite) blackberry and apple pie is continuing a tradition as old - if not older - than any other. Brambles are so widespread in countryside and town that they are available to almost anyone for the price of a pleasant hour and a few scratches. So why not grab a bag or plastic tub and head out to your nearest bramble patch and play a small part in an ancient association between people and an indomitable wild plant?

Road Verge Campaign: The Cutting Edge update

Its always heart-warming to log on to good news. So thank you Liz Anderson for the following message and photograph posted on our Facebook page:

This is a fabulous example of Central Beds. Road Verge Nature Reserves - such an improvement on last years cutting regime they look fantastic and deserve a well done:

We can't help but agree.

We've also received praise for Isle of Wight Council and South Derbyshire District Council. And there was also this lovely tweet from Carl Cornish:

@cornishca: @Love_plants Photo of common spotted orchids on Notified Road Verge at Eaton Wood, Notts:

Alas, according to Steve James, all was not well elsewhere in Nottinghamshire:

@stevejamesPCC: Upper Broughton's top green planted as a wildflower meadow in 2000 was strimmed completely Saturday morning.

And it was happening on the road verges too:

 

Now this is not to take away from the good work that is evidently being done at Eaton Wood Notified Road Verge. But it does beg the question: should a road verge have to be designated as "Notified" or a reserve in order for it to be managed with a bit more care for our wildlife? Please let us know your thoughts in the Comments below.

Elsewhere we received complaints about Leeds and Worcestershire County Councils:

@WildlifeofLeeds: @Love_plants @leedscc mowing down 1000s of meadow buttercups right now on Roundhay Ring Road


@Blacklaceknits: @Love_plants lovely wild verges along A456 being mown to ground level by Worcestershire County Council. Very disappointing.

And some more "Before and After" images to add to our Gallery of Shame: 

Susie Clark on Facebook: I am currently staying in Staffordshire and on way to Fradley South shops from Fradley village witnessed the decimation of a wildflower meadow into a green flattened area.

Before:

After:

But let's end on a more positive note. We received the following image from Charlie Bloom, of a wild flower garden she created to raise awareness of our meadow and road verge flora. It won the RHS Bronze Medal winning Show Garden at BBC Gardeners World Live.

 

Let's hope the message is getting through. As always you can sign the petition and rate your council on the campaign homepage.

Coastal dunes project

Posted by Andy Byfield, Plantlife's Landscape Conservation Manager

Work continues apace at Kenfig to reverse the fortunes of many rare plants that grow there.  Diggers are again on site scraping away coarse vegetation to reveal the all important sand below.  The reason that we – and our partners Bridgend County Borough Council and the Countryside Council for Wales – are doing this is simple: over the millennia our rarer sand dune plants and animals have evolved to cope with the vagaries of ever-shifting sand, yet these days, our dunes have become cloaked by a thick, lush thatch of plant life.  The result: classic species such as petalwort, fen orchid and many other beautiful plants are declining fast, and some are steadily heading towards extinction.

The fen orchid.  Image © Tim Pankhurst

Britain’s sand dunes seem to be changing, as the high hills of blowing sand have ‘greened-over’.  Various factors may be to blame.  Increasing deposition of nitrates and other nutrients are being deposited across our lands as the rains bring industrial and agricultural pollutants back down to earth, feeding coarse vegetation.  There seems to be less sand off shore to feed mobile dunes.  And one can’t help thinking that this year’s excessive rains have simply allowed lush vegetation to become lusher still.

Last year, Plantlife coordinated the clearance of over three hectares of dunescape in the hope of exposing sufficient bare sand to kick-start natural duneland erosion, an as I write this the diggers are in expanding the area to a vast 10 hectares – by far the largest example of sand dune rejuvenation ever undertaken in Britain.

And not surprisingly, the media have been  keen to find out just what is going on.  I have just returned from filming a forthcoming BBC Countryfile item about our work with Matt Baker and his team from the BBC.  If you want to know more, tune into BBC One this coming Sunday evening (27th January).