Who IS killing our glorious wildflowers?

...And can a budding ‘Noah’s Ark’ for England’s most dazzling – and endangered – specimens save the day?

IT IS a glorious sight. From where I’m standing, the meadow is as speckled with colour as an Impressionist painting.

Wildflowers are growing with exuberance. Towering, ceruleanblue spikes of viper’s bugloss contrast cheerfully with the pillarbox red of poppies.

On the other side of the hedge is a bank of pink opium poppies, which have been growing harmlessly in Britain since the Bronze Age. There are a dozen species of orchid, including Maids of Kent and the beguiling ‘man’ orchid, socalled after its clusters of flowers that look like primitive people.

But, for rarity, all are eclipsed by the corn cockle, a tall plant whose flowers are like dishes made from amethyst, sparkling like jewels at top of the sward.

It’s a quintessentially English scene, you might think. Yet such a view is not just becoming rare, it is in danger of extinction, with some of our native flowers at risk of being wiped out altogether.

Until this summer, I’d never seen a corn cockle growing in the wild. Once common, its numbers have become so reduced that the only place in Britain where it comes up naturally each summer is at the spot where I’m standing – in the heart of Ranscombe Farm in Kent, owned by Plantlife International.

How could such a wonderful flower become endangered? Well, farmers hate it. And they have been determined – in the otherwise admirable cause of increasing food production – to drive it from their land.

The corn cockle has big, heavy seeds which, in the old days, were difficult to separate from wheat when grain was winnowed. If they got into the corn when milled, they spoilt the flour. In fact, if you ate too many of them, you could get a nasty tummy ache. Mechanical grain-sorting led to its elimination by the end of the 20th Century.

Even the common flowers that add colour to our lanes and meadows are declining. There are fewer campions, violets, speedwells and orchids than there were a generation ago.

The decline was recently assessed in a Plantlife report which found that 50 counties across Britain have lost flowers since the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. In the introduction to that report, the Prince of Wales wrote of his ‘dismay’ that a wild plant was lost to Gloucestershire, where he has his home at Highgrove, every two years. Species widely lost include field gentian, burnt orchid, royal fern, corn cleavers and small-white orchid.

Farmers are not the only culprits – development is also to blame. The report says: ‘Middlesex has lost 146 species out of 816, that is 18 per cent, in its transformation from a largely rural to an almost completely suburban county.’

Cambridgeshire has lost 120 species out of a native flora of

‘Such a beautiful scene is in danger of extinction’

897 species – 13 per cent. So a visit to Ranscombe, at its most colourful in June and July, is a reminder of what England once was. For Britain’s wildflowers, this is a very important place indeed and has been for centuries.

Botanists have been busy here since at least the 1600s: meadow clary, a splendid purple-flowered relative of the sage, was discovered here in 1699. In 1792, another botanical coup was the identification of the rough or hairy mallow, a charming, low-growing plant with large, pink flowers which do not last more than a day.

One reason Ranscombe is home to some of the rarest wildflowers in Britain is that the general landscape hasn’t changed in 400 years. Another is that Plantlife manages the farm for these flowers.

Without the intervention of this small but valiant charity, founded by a group of botanists in 1989, the corn cockle would have disappeared as a native plant. Now it flowers to delight visitors, including walkers on the Pilgrims’ Way footpath that crosses the farm.

You can buy corn cockles in a wildflower mix but they won’t become established, because this is one of the plants whose habits are inextricably connected with the arable crops they have grown among since farming began.

They have adapted themselves to the conditions supplied by agriculture. Plants like the corn cockle are so used to the effect of ploughing that they will only germinate when the soil is disturbed.

Can anything be done to reproduce the Ranscombe effect in other places? Parish councils could insist that roadside verges are maintained for wildflowers. But one of the big challenges for wildflowers is extra nitrogen in the soil – good for nettles, cow parsley and goosegrass, but bad for more delicate species which get choked. Nitrogen is produced by car exhausts, but its presence in verges is reduced if nettles are cut and dead foliage removed.

Gardeners can help. I know this will be heresy to some, but couldn’t part of the lawn be allowed to grow wild? You may be surprised by what comes up, as some wildflower seeds remain viable for many decades, waiting for the right conditions to grow.

Then there’s Defra. It’s all very well encouraging farmers to leave strips for nature under environmental schemes. It’s no good at all for arable wildflowers when (as at present) the condition is made that those strips aren’t ploughed.

Many wildflower meadows have been made from seed mixes in recent years and they are all to the good. They cannot, however, entirely replace the joy of seeing blooms that have appeared spontaneously. That is a particularly British pleasure – expressed by Rupert Brooke when he wrote, comparing the charm of Grantchester village near Cambridge to the regimentation of the German countryside: ‘Unkempt about those hedges blows an English unofficial rose.’