In September last year, the 90th new Coronation Meadow was created in London’s Green Park, named the Queen’s Meadow.  Earlier this month, a small group from Plantlife, trustees, members and staff, went to see the meadow.  We wanted to check progress, see what was in bloom or setting seed and identify as many species as possible.  The gang had varied botanical skills.  A couple of volunteers had spent a fair amount of time as field biologists earlier in their careers and were really pleased to get out of the office and start botanising again.  We only looked at a sample of the area, probably less than a quarter of the meadow.  Here’s what we found:

Creeping buttercup, red clover, white clover, oxeye daisy, ribwort plantain, germander speedwell, cut-leaved crane’s-bill, goat’s-beard, spear thistle, yellow rattle, creeping thistle, wild carrot, yarrow, common poppy, cornflower, mallow sp, cock’s-foot, crested dog’s-tail, meadow fescue, false oat-grass, perennial ryegrass, sweet vernal grass, timothy, Yorkshire fog.  Some of these, like common poppy, are plants of arable land and may well have been in the Green Park soil for some time, spurred into germinating by the disturbance to the ground.  A lot of yellow rattle seed was included in the original mix. A quick count of yellow rattle seed heads in one square metre sample plot got to over 250.

Plantlife’s Great British Wildflower Hunt is running this summer, making it really easy for people to notice what’s in flower around them and record what they see.  One of the Wildflower Hunt records comes from Green Park, closer to Green park tube than the Queen’s Meadow.  These Wildflower Hunters found just three species, creeping buttercup, daisy and white clover.  It’s clear that Coronation Meadows is bringing much more diversity to central London for many people to enjoy.

There is a bit too much grass in places but the yellow rattle has taken well and will reduce the grass in the future. As is the nature of meadow creation, it will take a few years for it to settle down and establish but overall we are pleased with the first season.   The Royal Parks will cut the meadow very soon and we’ll all have to wait patiently to see how it looks next spring.

Michael Krause, Plantlife

As we come to the end of our third year it’s a good time to take stock of what has been achieved under the project banner. In the autumn we saw our 90th meadow being sown, with help from His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and while it may be too early to know how successful that seeding has been, early signs of germination are good.

It can take 5 to 10 years before newly sown meadows properly establish, however reports from meadows seeded in the first two years of the project are very encouraging, with many already showing significant changes. This can be most easily seen in those sites where seeding was focussed in specific areas rather than across the whole.

The restoration of Middledown in Somerset is one such example. Here, when the Somerset Wildlife Trust arrived in summer 2014 to power harrow and sow the seed they had harvested from their nearby Chancellors Farm reserve, they found rows of cut hay still on site waiting to be collected. As a result they could only harrow and seed the strips between the rows of hay. The following summer the meadow was striped with yellow flashes as yellow rattle, eyebright and cat’s ear dominated the seeded areas, while a year later though the action of hay cutting and grazing cattle had started the process of moving more seed around, the continued success of the original seeding was still clear.
 

Middledown June 2015 (top) and June 2016 (above)

In East Sussex, at one of the first meadows to be seeded under the project, an edge of the meadow beside a hedgerow was deliberately left unsown by local partners the Weald Meadows Initiative to help assess the effect of the works. By May the following year the difference was apparent with the hedgerow strip remaining a uniform green while the rest of the meadow was bursting into life. In time, through the action of casting the hay cut to the side of the mower and through grazing, the wildflowers should slowly spread into the unsown strip too.

Triangle field, East Sussex

Understandably with the complexities of nature it hasn’t been perfect across the board. A handful of sites that were unable to get on top of their dock plants ahead of opening up bare ground for seeding have seen a subsequent increase in these troublesome ‘weeds’ making more work for them in the coming year, which is a salutary lesson to potential future meadow makers. However more pleasant side-effects have been reported elsewhere, including the Monmouthshire and Warwickshire restorations, where green-winged orchids have been newly sighted. These are unlikely to have arrived in the actual seed cast, as orchids typically take a few years to germinate and establish, more likely the act of opening up patches of bare ground to cast seed over has allowed dormant seed to finally flourish. Either way it is a heart-warming result that an iconic meadow plant that has seen such a reduction in numbers over recent years is reappearing.

Green-winged orchid at Dunchurch meadow, Warwickshire - Kay Reeve

The beauty of meadows as any owner will tell you is that they are constantly changing and throwing up new surprises, whether in the plants flowering or the butterflies and other insects that come to find them. All our new meadow owners have agreed to manage their sites for the long-term and in the coming summers they should continue to get more diverse and colourful year on year.

Once again then a big thank you to our funders, our local partners and to the new meadow owners for helping us to bring back meadows to our countryside.
Dan Merrett, Coronation Meadows Project Manager
 

This September saw a major milestone in the Coronation Meadows project with the seeding of the 90th meadow in the 60th UK county. With the project having been initiated by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales to mark the 60th anniversary of The Queen’s coronation it was fitting that the 90th meadow was sown in an acre of The Green Park central London, within sight of the grounds of Buckingham Palace, in this year of The Queen’s 90th birthday.

His Royal Highness attended the event, hosted by Plantlife Vice-president Rachel de Thame, along with an eager group of meadow makers comprising representatives of donor meadow owners, local partner organisations, volunteers, native breed grazing animals and funders including the main project funder Biffa Award. The Prince joined local children in spreading seed collected from the West Sussex and Greater London donor Coronation Meadows, before chatting with the assembled guests.

Passing Londoners and tourists were surprised to see not only royalty but also working shire horses and a hackney pony along with North Ronaldsay and Hebridean sheep as part of what was a colourful event in the area in front of the bomber command memorial. The shire horses dragged a harrow to create bare ground close to the marquee while the wider site was power harrowed by tractor overseen by project steering group member and Weald Meadows Partnership and HWLT Trustee Keith Datchler OBE. Even the tractor had dressed for the day with the contractor Agrifactors giving the bonnet a wildflower wrap. 

The meadow, which has been christened The Queen’s Meadow in honour of Her Majesty, will be retained by the Royal Parks in perpetuity and it is hoped will develop an attractive show of meadow wildflowers, highlighting the work that has been happening through the project across the UK to bring meadows back to both town and country.

The group met at the RSPB’s Leighton Moss reserve with the aim of providing a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences, focussing on the role of grazing in hay meadow restoration. Leighton Moss is centred at the heart of the Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Beauty (AONB), one of England’s richest and most diverse conservation areas and noted for the beauty of its grasslands.

Introductions, led by Ruth Dalton, Field Officer for the RBST, were followed by a talk from Bill Grayson, co-owner of the Morecambe Bay Conservation Grazing Company (MBCGC), who with his wife, Cath, has, over the past 20 years, developed a specialized cattle grazing system that is dedicated to delivering benefits for nature conservation across a range of sites throughout north west England from its base in this AONB. The ecological value of all these various sites has steadily increased under the sympathetic grazing management they receive by these means. 

Although this makes MBCGC quite a specialist farming business, it relies on much the same sources of income as any other upland livestock holding, most of which comes from the area payments that derive from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. It also benefits financially from being organically certified, which secures a 5-10% premium for the cattle sale price, whilst achieving significant savings in input costs. All the grazing land is rented, but the landlords are mostly conservation bodies like RSPB, Natural England, and the Wildlife Trusts, all of whom recognize the special benefits that this nature-friendly grazing service provides, showing their appreciation by only charging very modest rents for the land.

It might seem inappropriate to look to a grazing operation for ideas about restoring traditional meadows, which are generally considered to rely on being mown each year for a hay crop. However, MBCGC has had years of experience of meadow management and is currently restoring about 60 acres of meadow in all. The crop that is taken from the holding’s better fields is used both as a winter feed for the cattle and also to provide a source of flower seed by which the species richness of fields at the start of the restoration process is enhanced. The process used is similar to green hay strewing but differs in that it relies on dried hay rather than fresh-cut grass. Its main advantage is the extra convenience with which it fits into the already busy work schedule of a livestock farm, where groups of cattle can be out-wintered and fed on the recipient sites. The animals eat most of the bulky material from where it is scattered in small heaps across the site, choosing different parts of the field each day to avoid excessive damage to the turf. This allows any seeds contained in the hay to fall out, whereupon they get trodden into the surface of the soil, ready to start germinating the following spring.  

Having listened to Bill’s account of the work of MBCGC, the group set out to visit Gait Barrows National Nature Reserve, where Bill and Cath’s cattle have been coming for the last 20 years to graze its 30 acres of pasture, pasture that has, over the last 10 years, become one of the richest sites in terms of its species composition anywhere in the Arnside & Silverdale AONB. On this occasion, the herd consisted of just 12 cows – a mixture of Red Polls, Shorthorns and Blue Greys - all running with a Red Poll bull.

The cattle had arrived on the site just a few days previously so most of its floristic interest was still very much in evidence, with carpets of yellow rattle, northern marsh orchid, spotted orchid, ox-eye daisy, self heal, cats ear and rough hawkweed, all combining to make the kind of colourful floristic display that we all associate with a traditional hay meadow.

Surprisingly, however, this is one species-rich meadow that is not mown for hay, or at least not any more. Instead, the crop  is completely removed by the grazing activities of the cattle, which are brought on at the beginning of July each year and removed at the end of November. This system has proved to be very effective in allowing this attractive diversity of flowers, one by one, to establish and spread across the site, all of them following closely in the footsteps of the hay rattle, which acts as catalyst in the whole process. This had started as a fairly uninteresting expanse of species-poor grassland back in 1990 when the then-tenant decided to give up mowing it, having decided that the diminishing yields being achieved without fertilizers had made it unviable in farming terms. Things stayed this way for nearly ten more years and really only began to change once the start date for grazing was put back from 1st June to 1st July each year, a change that allowed the hay rattle, which was then confined to one small section of the site, more time in which to flower and set seed before being exposed to any grazing impact. The response was almost immediate and within a year or two the rattle had begun to advance across the site with new plants seen flowering several hundred metres from their original location. The movement of animals around the site must have been helping the seed to spread, clinging to damp and muddy hooves so that, gradually, over a period of 10 years it has now extended its range across the whole 30 acres. This paved the way for the orchids, knapweed, ox-eye daisy and the rest to begin their own take over of the site, taking advantage of the grasses’ reduced vigour, following the parasitic impact of the hay rattle. Hopefully this process will continue to allow new flower species to find their way into the Gait Barrows pastures, creating an ever-more attractive mix of species, all the more special because it has been ordained by Mother Nature herself, ably assisted by some very willing cows.

Gait Barrows demonstrates that grazing alone can be a surprisingly effective means for managing and restoring meadows, provided that the stocking levels and timing can be appropriately set. This does away with the costly machinery and the manpower needed to get a hay crop and all the angst of having to wait for that vital spell of fine weather in which to safely gather home the harvest. The key here is being able to delay the start of grazing until the flowering season is well under way, by which time the nutritional value of the grazing will have begun to decline, making this a less attractive option for farmers wishing to maximise growth rates of their livestock. MBCGC only uses breeds of livestock native to Britain because they are noted for their ability to thrive on unimproved pastures and rough grazing compared with breeds from continental Europe, which usually require a more intensive diet, usually based around ‘improved’ grasslands, made lush from the use of artificial fertilizers.

For most meadow restoration projects, the biggest problem to be overcome is the excess of soil nutrients left over from past use of these fertilizers. This normally takes several years of removing the hay crop whilst not applying fertilizers or manure, a process that eventually reduces soil fertility to levels that allow wild flowers to establish and compete with the more competitive grasses. This worked well enough in the initial years of restoration at Gait Barrows; so well in fact that mowing was eventually abandoned when the yield had diminished to the point where hay-time was no longer viable. It’s very unlikely that, without this fertility-reduction phase, these meadows would ever have achieved their current levels of species richness.

Having viewed the grazed meadows of Gait Barrows, the group returned to Leighton Moss for refreshments. This was followed by further discussions, led by Ruth, who provided a useful overview of the options for and issues arising from the use of grazing animals in meadow restoration. The day concluded with a question and answer session during which a number of points arising from the day were raised and technical queries were dealt with.

The new Coronation Meadow at Eycott Hill Nature Reserve, restored in 2014 using seed from Cumbria's ancient Coronation Meadow at Piper Hole, has been buzzing with activity this summer. There have been guided walks, mini beast hunts, bio-blitzes, wildflower id courses, a creative writing day, and the very important annual survey.

Above: survey of Eycott Meadow in July

The results have been encouraging with lots of yellow rattle and eyebright, which are great species to see in a meadow as they feed off the more vigorously growing grasses and help more delicate flowers to thrive.

Above: yellow rattle

It’s been amazing to see so many people enjoying the meadow and commenting on how fantastic it looks and it can only get better as the restoration goes on.

The flowers and meadow wildlife are also the inspiration for an exciting arts project. Cumbria Wildlife Trust are working with arts charity Prism Arts on a programme supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The aim is to welcome a wide range of people to the nature reserve and to encourage them to respond to it in a fun and creative way.

Above: event at Eyecott Hill meadows

A group of older people from Amy’s Care in Carlisle and adults with learning disabilities from the Edington Centre and Eden Mencap in Penrith have been visiting Eycott Hill Nature Reserve to enjoy the meadows, look at wildflowers, and watch wildlife including bees and butterflies. These visits are followed up with indoor workshops to produce textile art for an exhibition later in the year.

Above and top: Indoor art session with Edington Centre and Eden Mencap

Above: Amy's Care visit, looking at the meadow flowers

The meadows are due to be cut soon and then the next stage of restoration will begin – plug planting! We have 3,000 wildflower plugs to plant so volunteers are welcome to visit and lend a hand on:

• Thursday 18 August plug planting work party
• Wednesday 24 August plug planting work party

Do join in if you can!

The restoration work at Eycott Meadows is funded by Biffa Award Landfill Communities Fund as part of their generous support for Coronation Meadow restoration in England and Wales, and also by the Wren community action fund.

Sat behind a desk in an office it is sometimes easy to forget that, out in the wider world, hardworking organisations are using Biffa Award funding to make a very real and tangible difference. On the surface, grant funding can appear quite soulless; a list of assets to acquire and resources to monitor. But we have seen first-hand that Biffa Award funding means so much more, and can make a real lasting change to people’s lives by transforming environments for the benefit of everyone.

On a sunny June afternoon, I visited Nottinghamshire’s recipient Coronation Meadow on the outskirts of former mining town Shireoaks. The village gets its name from an ancient oak tree which stood where the boundaries of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire met. This cross county botany was a fitting beginning for my Coronation Meadows adventure. The ambition of restoring a meadow in every county is a beautiful one, and standing at the meeting point of three shires it feels not only achievable, but inspirational.

For 136 years Shireoaks Colliery was the lifeblood of this village and, as with many parts of the midlands, the decline of the mining industry led to a profound loss of identity and purpose for the community. Since the pit’s closure in 1990 the site has been reclaimed by nature; the former colliery has been reborn as the ‘Woodlands’ recreational area which offers a great space for wildlife and the community - whilst still paying tribute to its industrial past. Care has been taken to ensure that the social story of the area is retained within the natural landscape. Pulley wheels frame the entrance to the reserve and a memorial on the crest of the former spoil heap honours the men who lost their lives to the pit.

Biffa Award is able to distribute grants to benefit communities and environments in the proximity of landfill sites as part of The Landfill Communities Fund. It is so appropriate for places like Shireoaks so steeped in industrial history. In these difficult economic times, grants can help breathe new life into communities, who have felt overlooked by the wider world for so long.

A few miles away across the A1 lies Ashtons Meadow, the ‘donor’ meadow which provided the initial green hay used to rebuild the biodiversity of the site. ¬ The meadow itself is a long, thin strip between the woodland and the main road into the village. The wheel of a tractor has left a deep scar in one corner creating a mini ecosystem; a furrow providing a habitat for insect larvae and flourishing marsh orchids. You can spy tiny red flowers of scarlet pimpernel between the yellow rattle, dandelions and purple heads of red clover. A survey last year highlighted the presence of more than 40 varied plant species, and this diversity is increasing year on year.

Resourceful song thrushes can be seen using the lumps of concrete – one of the few remaining legacies of the pit - as anvils to crack open snail shells.  As for butterflies, I saw large whites during my visit and I’m reliably informed that on a good day you can see marbled whites too. In the evenings, a resident barn owl haunts the meadow - searching for field mice amongst the grasses.  Oak and walnut saplings are encroaching on the meadow, their seeds distributed by jays. These young trees are then lovingly nursed by a local volunteer group and moved to a wooded area on top of the hill to help maintain the unique ecology of the site.

The story of the Shireoaks Meadow is that of a wild landscape converted into an industrial one for over a century, and ultimately reclaimed by nature in the most remarkable and beautiful way.

Catherine Boggild is Communications Officer for the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts

I had a fantastic day at the Coronation Meadows Restoration Practitioners Workshop 2016 which was held at the National Wildflower Centre in Knowsley. The day entailed a guided tour around the Centre where we learnt how wildflower seed was collected, cleaned and stored on a commercial basis. The Centre also trials planting species in different substrate – everything from chalk to recycled clothing. We had an interesting time looking around the substrate plots, identifying species. Our most amazing find was a bee orchid thriving in broken up tarmac!

Later, Coronation Meadows Project Officers had the opportunity to share ideas and techniques and consult with academics and organisations including Landlife, Ecoseeds, and OpenSpace . Topics included how to increase biodiversity on  more fertile sites, best practice for planting plugs, and  innovative  conservation approaches such as Landlife’s soil inversion project. I found the day extremely productive and informative, and will definitely be applying some of the useful hints and tips gained, to my meadow work.

Tanya St Pierre - Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust (YDMT) Haytime Officer 

I’m standing in a meadow with hundreds of yellow rattle seedlings around my feet. The ground is thick with them - there must be many thousands of plants across the whole field. What’s remarkable is there were absolutely none here last year.

Last September, we undertook restoration of our 3 acre field at Tyddyn Afon (header picture) as part of the Coronation Meadows project. In a flurry of activity, seed was brought here from the ‘donor’ meadow – the National Trust’s Mosshill reserve, a remarkable flower-rich meadow down the valley which is the Coronation Meadow for Conwy. Our ‘receptor’ field had been prepared beforehand – scalped and harrowed until it was bare and brown - and green hay and brush-harvested seed from Moss Hill were spread across the field. This is where all the yellow rattle seed came from, and it’s absolutely thrilling to see this and many other flowers now germinating in the field (you can follow the restoration with this video and blog).

For me, the excitement of what’s to come in the months ahead is on two levels. Firstly, there’s the huge personal excitement of seeing our own field begin to transform into a sea of wildflowers. Secondly, there’s the knowledge that ours is just one of many meadows being restored across the UK, we’re part of a meadows revival that’s taking place as the Coronation Meadows project moves into a very important year.  

Since the project began in 2013, the beating heart of the project – the hard work of meadow creation and restoration - has been supported by generous funding from Biffa Award as part of the Landfill Communities Fund. So far, their £1 million grant has enabled us to:

• Create and restore 66 wildflower meadows, totalling 575 acres, in 45 counties across the UK
• Grow over 42,000 plug plants for planting into the meadows at 11 special on-site nurseries
• Involve nearly 600 volunteers in bringing meadows back to life where they live, undertaking a range of activities including haymaking, spreading green hay, collecting wildflower seed by hand and surveying meadows for orchids and other flowers
• Provide training to 76 land managers so that they are able to look after their own wildflower meadows for years to come
• Teach over 70 surveyors how to monitor meadows in detail, so they can track changes in the vegetation over time

We are now in the final year of Biffa Award funding. For the three project partners, Plantlife, The Wildlife Trusts, and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, it looks like being a remarkable twelve months. The schedule of activity has just been confirmed and will see our busiest ever year, with a frenzy of activity on 58 different meadows across the UK from Cornwall to Northumberland and from Co. Down to Norfolk. Some meadows will be created from scratch, others created last year will receive a second dose of seed from their ‘donor’ meadows, fences will be erected so meadows can be grazed, plug plants will be grown and planted out and volunteers will cut hay, collect seed, spread seed and monitor the appearance of flowers. By the end of the year, the project will have seen the creation and restoration of 90 wildflower meadows across the UK, totalling 980 acres in all.

This will be a rather astonishing achievement. When you remember that over 97% of our wildflower meadows have been destroyed since the 1930s, every single meadow that can be created or restored today counts towards healing the damage.

The Coronation Meadows project has also helped to initiate a sort of meadows revival. People are actually talking about meadows again. The interest in creating wildflower meadows has never been greater and many are discovering the astonishing beauty of their local Coronation Meadows (if you’ve not visited yours, they’ll be at their best in the next few months). The value of grazing by native breeds of cattle and sheep – hardy animals well adapted to thriving on wildflower meadows – is beginning to be appreciated by farmers and livestock owners. Scything courses are oversubscribed. Social media is full of pictures of meadow wildlife and magazines, newspapers and TV programmes are all featuring articles and items about meadows, bringing both their plight and their potentially brighter future to a much wider audience.  

At long last, it seems that there really is a buzz in the meadows.

Dr Trevor Dines, Coronation Meadows Steering Group

Bore da everyone, welcome to my last blog.
My cousin’s and I are now grazing on our own at the Monmouthshire Coronation Meadow site – New Grove Meadows. We are going a really important job here, in grazing all of the grass that has regrown since the hay cut in August. This regrowth reduces the amount of light for next year’s wild flowers and they will struggle to complete against the grass.

The black sheep in the photograph are hebridean sheep which are also owned by Gwent Wildlife Trust. They are the most widely used sheep breed for conservation grazing so are much more common than us Hill Radnor’s. Hebridean’s browse scrub a lot more than us, so our joint grazing patterns form a great combination for nature reserve management.

We will be at New Grove Meadows until the New Year when we go back to Wyeswood Common and in April I will get to meet the next generation of conservation graziers!

I hope that you have enjoyed these blogs and maybe we will see you in the future.

Diolch,
Ffleur

Coronation Meadow project officers had lovely weather for their ‘create a meadow seed bank’ training in Lancashire this week. Participants learnt how to assess a plant population, collect, prepare and store seed with bespoke low tech kit which they were able to take away with them. The course was run by Sarah Robinson of the Bowland Haytime and Networks for Nectar Projects from Bell Sykes farm in Bowland. We will be running this course in the south of the UK in 2016. If you are involved in meadow restoration and interested in attending please contact the Coronation Meadows project staff