JOHN CRAVEN
Nature thrives when given free rein, so when it comes to our green spaces, let’s mow less and plant more.
Nature isn’t Neat.” What better slogan could there be for a biodiversity initiative that is transforming swathes of closely cropped public parkland into rich wildflower meadows in the Welsh county of Monmouthshire?
“Our once rather boring, uniformly green local park is now a colourful haven for bees and other pollinators,” I was told by one regular user. “All manner of life, including my family, is really benefitting from the change.”
Popping up amid the long grass in the county’s 100 hectares of parks are plants such as oxeye daisy, celandine, black knapweed, bugle and bluebell, as well as the usual dandelions and buttercups – but wilding doesn’t mean that traditional amenities suffer.
SCRUFFY BEAUTY
“The challenge for us is finding the right balance between providing short grass where it is needed – such as in sports fields, recreational patches and picnic spots – and developing the environmental benefits of meadows,” says Mark Cleaver, who is in charge of the project.
“Managing for neatness wasn’t really achieving anything and we are bringing to the fore the beauty of scruffy edges. In the early days, we received complaints about not enough mowing but now I think it is going the other way.”
Meadowland is being created around park boundaries, in open spaces, under trees and on steep slopes. Pathways of mown grass are cut through to allow children to play and everyone to explore the new areas and enjoy the flowers, which fulfil their entire life cycles and regenerate.
Three special mowers have been bought – with grants from the National Heritage Lottery Fund and the Welsh Government – which are capable of cutting long grass when flowering is over and taking away the clippings. The funding also pays for schools and community groups to be told about ‘Nature Isn’t Neat’. And volunteers are being recruited to spend 15 minutes each month measuring areas of meadow and logging the flowers and insects they find.
Plantlife’s ‘No Mow May’ campaign gave Monmouthshire’s parks a boost but it also made many of us realise how quickly our lawns go wild if we don’t tend them regularly. The ragged look must have horrified those who insist on immaculate, weed-free manicured lawns but I liked it and decided that a largish area of my lawn will stay wild. Already there are more bees (and flowers I can’t identify) so I’m doing my bit for biodiversity.
LET BRITAIN BLOOM
So, too, are thousands of people across the UK who have signed up to Countryfile’s Plant Britain project, which over two years aims to plant 750,000 trees – one for every child who started school in 2020. When I checked the website early last month, the figures were impressive – 434,611 new trees and well over a quarter of a million patches of flowers, plants, fruit and vegetables had been planted.
Plant Britain is just one way that we can invest in nature. A recent report by the Wildlife Trusts says that such investment improves people’s lives, helps cut emissions and could play a major role in rebuilding the economy after the pandemic. Monmouthshire is by no means the only authority to be wilding some of its public spaces and I, for one, would love the concept to spread nationwide. After all, since the 1930s, the UK has lost more than three million hectares of wildflower meadows – that’s an area one and a half times the size of Wales.
• Take part in Countryfile’s Plant Britain campaign: plantbritain.co.uk