Cross Pollination
Last year we sowed a wildflower meadow. Kindly provided by Heritage Seeds who specialize in regional wildflower and grass seeds for our area, we spread the seed optimistically over our orchard. The weather was dry but we all knew it would rain soon enough and the seeds would spring to life decorating the land with beautiful wildflowers.
It didn’t.
Instead a desiccating carpark of dry and compacting soil struggled to provide purchase for anything other than the most rugged of pioneers. Some plantain poked its head up, mullein that had hidden in the seed bed of the soil towered out of the otherwise bare looking patches of parched earth. Of course this was in deep lockdown and the orchard of trees that were planted amongst the meadow mix needed irrigation. I ran from the tap one end of the garden to the trees at the other armed with two watering cans. By the 8th trip I had given up on both the meadow, the trees and my arms ever being the same length, before fortunately Dan and Paul could safely return to the rescue.
Fast forward a year and the meadow is a different story. The ½ acre of wildflower and fruit trees are both looking decidedly happier, with ox-eye daisies and vetches popping up everywhere, clovers blooming underneath and new varieties I am less familiar with but very curious about, surprising us all. Suddenly I feel quite proud of the area, it has gone from being a slightly embarrassing worry to looking like nature and us knowing what we were doing.
And then things got better again.
Paul Morton of Birds Of Poole Harbour and one of our visiting bird experts were walking the gardens when he suddenly noticed something special. A woodlark displaying on the paths in the meadow. Immediately he knew this to be a distraction technique used to lure him away from a nesting site and so he informed us that we should probably close the area off.
Of course, it was a shame not to be able to share the orchards with our visitors but, being able to share the space with a rare ground-nesting bird who found the gardens safer and more comfortable than the expansive wilderness just over the walls says something special about what we only dreamed of being able to achieve. We may have made things ever so slightly better for nature. Maybe only for a brief window but still, it’s a simple but profound message – we (humans) don’t always have to make things worse!
Just a few weeks before we had Miles King of People Need Nature as a guest to the gardens along with trustee Matt Shaw. Miles, a national grasslands specialist (and the guy who put us in touch with Heritage seed co. in the first place) speaks eloquently about the impact of meadows on biodiversity and us. I think he can finish up best with an excerpt from the beautiful People Need Nature blog where Miles writes:
“Meadows have morphed – from places created to keep animals alive through the winter, or to fuel the horse-powered economy. Their economic purpose has gone, but now they fulfil a different need, one that is just as vital – the need within us all to be in nature, to enjoy its colours, its sounds, its smells, all of it. The children understand this implicitly, fundamentally, without any need for thought, consideration or analysis. It is us the adults, “who must unlearn what we have learnt”, who must see nature through the child’s eye, to see the beauty in a meadow, the beauty in a lowly buttercup seed; and realise that every village, every town and every city, must have a meadow wherever we can put one.” Read the full meadows blog.
For ways to support meadows or to grow your own take a look at this article from the Eden Project.
