Plantlife ~ Preserving Wild Meadows
AT THYME | Words from plantlife
Stand in a field of intensively farmed grassland and, despite the apparent lushness at your feet, barely any life will be evident. No movement, no sound; a bright uniform green expanse.
Stand in a wildflower meadow in midsummer and the hum of life around you is almost overwhelming. Bees, butterflies and birdsong thrive amongst the living tapestry of soft pastel shades: the yellows of hawkbits and buttercups, the pinks of campion and clover, the purples of knapweed and orchids.
Water Meadows, Thyme
It took around 6,000 years to create the species-rich grassland for which the UK is globally famous. Yet in less than a century, we have lost 97%. Typically small and isolated, so many surviving meadowlands are not protected by wildlife legislation and are vulnerable to development. Unlike our woodlands, we are not so aware of local meadows and, to the untrained eye and for much of the year, meadows can look like any other field. We notice when a wood is being felled, but not when a field is being ploughed up. Species-rich grassland with undisturbed floral histories going back generations can be lost in a single afternoon. Today, meadows and species-rich grasslands are a rare and vanishing landscape, occupying less than 1% of UK land cover.
Thyme is a proud Patron of Plantlife, the conservation charity that is working to change this around. But whilst meadows are so often valued for their unquestionable romantic beauty, it would be a mistake to think their conservation is just about a nostalgic yearning for a vision of yesteryear.
Our surviving fragments of meadowlands - of which Thyme’s water meadows are one – are home to an unprecedented richness of species. Hundreds of different wild flowers and fungi have co-evolved over millennia with farmers managing the land as hay meadows and pasture. This unparalleled plant diversity in turn provides the life support for our invertebrates, birds and mammals. A fifth of all priority species for conservation action are associated with grassland landscapes. The water meadows at Thyme are host to reed warblers that have journeyed many thousands of miles from sub-Saharan Africa and the grasslands of South Africa to breed here, doubtless enjoying the astonishing numbers and diversity of invertebrates and pollinators that also thrive here.
Grasslands lock up a third of the world’s carbon and, the more species a grassland is home to, the more carbon it can store. Beyond the beauty and birdsong, flower-rich floodplain meadows have more absorbent soils so are able to hold back floodwater more effectively than improved grassland. And did you know that livestock grazed on species-rich grassland can be healthier? In Wales, they used to have ‘hospital field’; species-rich meadows where sickly animals were nurtured back to health.
Plantlife helps landowners to restore and create their own meadows and owns and manages meadow reserves across Britain. Every year, the first Saturday in July is National Meadows Day. What will you do this year to celebrate?
