ARABLE FIELDS IN JUNE

ith around 6.2 million hectares designated for crop production, arable farmland must surely be one of the UK’s most abundant terrestrial habitats. But with the majority of fields currently little more than large, featureless monocultures, the number of places capable of supporting a wide variety of arable flora and fauna has unsurprisingly become worryingly low.

Crops such as wheat, barley, oats, sugar beet and potatoes have been cultivated to feed the nation for millennia. Until as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, they were largely grown using traditional farming methods, and the arable fields created niches for a range of ‘weeds’, such as corn marigold, corncockle and various poppies. Many of these colourful

Wplants are in fact ancient introductions, or archaeophytes. The accidental, now cherished aliens are thought to date right back to Neolithic times, having arrived in the British Isles as stowaways among farm seed, when agriculture first spread across Europe.

Arable land, by its very nature, is a habitat that’s frequently disturbed by ploughing and harvesting. So, it tends to support those species best able to exploit the ephemeral, open conditions continually being created. Most of the weeds (any plant the farmer didn’t intend to grow, I’m not using the term pejoratively) in this environment are known as annuals. In other words, they complete their entire life-cycle in a year.

This opportunistic ability to grow, flower and set seed, often in a matter of weeks, means that weeds quickly proliferate when conditions are suitable. The seeds will then lie dormant in the soil, waiting for the opportunity to spring into action. So successful was this life strategy that some species were once so common they were considered pestilential. Pheasant’s eye, for example, which originated in the Mediterranean, grew in such profusion in the late 18th century that it was collected and sold as a cut flower in London’s Covent Garden under the pseudonym ‘red Morocco’.