We should talk of Ancient Grassland.

I’ve been thinking about how we describe ‘meadows’: Language changes over time and meanings shift depending on what most people see every day. A dictionary definition of a meadow is an area of grass that is cut to make hay; I might use the term meadow to make a more technical definition of wildflower-rich grassland (most often NVC communities MG5, MG4 and MG3) seem more palatable when giving a public talk; the ordinary person may praise the meadows being planted by the side of the road that look so pretty in the summer “you know, the ones with the lovely poppies” (which are in my reality hardy annual seed-mixes). As is often the case in English they are all correct, and within the Venn Diagram of ‘meadow’ are all these understandings; words mean whatever most people want them to mean. This being the case, what matters about the words we use to explain meadows of conservation and cultural importance is that the particular meaning intended by the explainer is clearly understood by the recipient of the explanation; preferably as quickly as is possible.

Perhaps we should talk of ancient grassland – ancient meadows and ancient grazing pastures – in the same way that we talk about ancient woodland habitat. Adding ‘ancient’ to the term grassland or meadow would allow us to convey something that would be easily understood by most people; it has been used before and is now something readily accepted. ‘Ancient’ used here would signify ‘native wildflowers and grasses that have been growing at a particular site for a long time and the site where they grow is of as much importance as a relic of a particular historic farming system as their biodiversity contribution’; they shouldn’t be seen as a moveable biodiversity unit. These plant communities are just as much a part of our heritage, telling us about our socio-economic cultural past, as are listed buildings and should be recognised as such.

Back to the present day, and at the cutting edge of horticultural research, new grassland and new flowering plant communities (sometimes made up with species from many different countries) are being created for urban areas, ones that are appropriate and useful to the present time and our current socio-economic climate, and these surely will also be termed meadows. In farming and land management there is a growing interest in producing plant communities of high biodiversity value which are relevant to present management systems rather than recreating historic meadow plant communities. You can see that we need to clearly differentiate the various understandings of what a meadow means, both now and into the future.

Instead of trying to get people to understand that a hardy annual seed-mix with poppies is technically not a meadow, we in conservation should change our own terms slightly and talk of ancient meadows and ancient grazing pastures and create a much-needed Ancient Grassland Inventory* just like we have an Ancient Woodland Inventory and an inventory of our protected historic buildings.

*How difficult would it be to create an Ancient Grassland Inventory? As with everything, the answer is ‘it depends’. The Ancient Woodland Inventory started out as one-person tracing from old maps with a pen; it is still provisional, as far as I know, having never been comprehensively surveyed on the ground.

I think money would be available from the Heritage Lottery Fund for a five-year project to create an inventory (once created this could then be adopted by government) alongside public awareness raising/involvement and perhaps some PhDs. Are there specific indicator species for ancient meadows as there are for ancient woodland? or perhaps an investigation to see if individual species have a wider genetic diversity in older meadows than newer and is there a way of spotting that visually? Are ancient grasslands representative of natural vegetation for that area?

There are an obvious group of charities, working together with one as lead, who could undertake the work but charities have limited project capacity so such things are not always practical or timely. It may be more achievable as a series of smaller regional projects building up towards a whole? I’ve been involved in a small local Heritage Lottery project mapping semi-natural grassland in my area. Sadly, I think the recent cutbacks at Natural England would make it almost impossible for them to manage such a project, especially with the added burden of work that leaving the EU brings.

 

Notes: I’ve been thinking about writing this since a local conference in early 2016 (I’m slow) http://www.tvgreenplaces.co.uk/2016/04/21st-century-meadows-conference/  and I finally wrote up my ideas in early May this year after returning from a Floodplain Meadows conference in York.  I bought a book by Martin Hammond “Deep Meadows and Transparent Floods” in which he writes about historical references to the meadows we visited as part of the conference…starting in the 8^th Century  https://rawcliffemeadows.wordpress.com/2017/05/11/deep-meadows-and-transparent-floods-the-story-of-the-ouse-ings/ . I also met Miles King and whilst we talked of other things, it occurred to me after writing the above blog that he might have written something on the subject…he did…in 2012 https://grasslandstrust.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/old-grasslands-need-an-equivalent-to-ancient-woodland-status/  Similarly the Wildlife Trusts have been calling for a national grassland Inventory, here in 2014 http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/grasslands and more recently Plantlife are running this project http://www.magnificentmeadows.org.uk/  and http://coronationmeadows.org.uk/ .

There’s a science paper from 2015 with good round up of other papers on the subject and what’s being lost. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989415300184#f000015

How fast do wood anemones grow?

One of the delights of English woodland in spring are the vast sheets of wood anemone that you can see. And they do grow in vast expanses, don’t they?

Except my friend Barry found some in a very small local suburban wood, where they grew in obvious clonal patches… which looked kind of odd.

A wood is shown on this site in 1853 (checked on the First Ed. O.S. map), but it can’t have been there for that long before as there is ridge and furrow (a sign of medieval ploughing) present and it clearly forms a boundary for a local manor house built in 1824.

The clonal patches thing reminded me of a local wildlife site on a beck valley side nearby (100m away) where wood anemones grow in greater profusion but still in patches (some patches in the photo above have very few flowers, some lots of flowers, some more petals than others, some slightly later flowering), which I hadn’t really thought that much about before. There is a tarmac path at the top of the slope, before the back gardens of the houses start, that runs along the length of the wood until meeting a road.

This patch was easy to see because of the pinkish tinge to the petals.

Further up the valley site they are in big expanses (on the right of the stream only – not on the left hand side at all) but it’s not as easy to see from the photograph because I was a bit early in the year (yes that is a shopping trolly in the middle – suburban innit?).

In local ancient woodland the clonal patches are not obvious and the plants form a continuous carpet (yes that is all wood anemone – on a sunny day it would be whiter with the flowers showing more as they open wider in the sun).

And so I wondered why, as you do.  It turns out that there are a surprising number of scientific papers on wood anemone on the internet, although most of us (me included) are restricted to reading the abstract. In the abstract of ‘Rhizome Growth and Clone Development in Anemone nemorosa L.’* by DEIRDRE A. SHIRREFFS & ADRIAN D. BELL (in Ann Bot (1984) 54 (3): 315-324.) it says “individual rhizomes elongate by an average of 2.5 cm per year” although not necessarily in a straight line year on year. So roughly speaking we can imagine a single seed germinating and growing outwards to give a maximum of 75cm growth from a single point in 30 years. The whole clonal patch would be twice that, as it would grow both sides of the germination point, so about 150cm in width. This was roughly the diameter of the bigger patches in the wood. Now the speed at which plants grow depends on how suited it is to the growing conditions, so let us just use that 150cm wide for a patch in 30 years to see where it gets us.

A clonal patch that is probably not flowering much because there are some low tree branches just above it. Wood anemones flower much better when they get more light, for example in the years shortly after a wood has been coppiced and before the canopy closes overhead again.

So what happened roughly 30 years ago that may have increased the number of suitable micro-sites required for germination? What about dutch elm disease? Sure enough there are young wych elm trees in the wood and the remains of the rotting tree trunks of the dead elms.

When the original trees died there would have been much more light reaching the wood floor – was this the point when those seeds germinated and the wood anemones started to colonize the wood?

But then how do the seeds get there in the first place? Wood anemone seeds have a small area of fatty tissue that entices ants to collect the seed to feed the fatty tissue to their larvae – the discarded seed then germinating near the ant nest. I didn’t look for ants. However, they also have a small hook at one end of the seed that could easily attach onto animal hair and be transported. In the mid-1980’s houses were built adjacent to the wood. With houses come dog owners and dogs go for walks and get all sorts of seed mixed up in their hair.

It’s fun to speculate and set up a hypothesis – it’s another thing entirely to test it: But it is interesting to think about, and by thinking about it you start to look for clonal patches of wood anemone when you visit a wood…and then start to wonder how long the wood anemones have been growing there…

 

*Their study also used computer modelling and measurement of 27 morphological characters to determine that in ancient woodland a continuous stretch of wood anemone will be made up of several different clones, as the clones intermingle (imagine patches growing into each other and continually mixing) the longer they have been growing there. Wood anemones are one of the wildflowers used as an ancient woodland indicator and so when present in large sheets you can see they must have been continuously growing there for hundreds of years.

I rarely see seedlings in the wild, though have found wood anemone to germinate readily from fresh seed sown in the nursery.  I suspect it would be difficult to differentiate a seedling from a small clonal rhizome that hadn’t flowered, especially when just casually walking through the wood which may account for not seeing many seedlings when visiting woods.

The I.Pot in March 2017

I cut back last year’s growth on the I.Pot the other day and so I thought it was time to do an update on what’s been happening.

This year is the first time I have actually cut the grass (quaking-grass and meadow oat-grass) leaves back to the ground (scissors, for those wondering how, and yes, I did pretend I was a sheep when I was doing it. Come on, everybody does, right?), before I carefully only cut out all the dead leaves and flower stems. This year was much quicker.

The grasses were growing a bit too strongly last year, and also were hiding the Fritillaria uva–vulpis (not native but I wanted to include a bulb in the pot and I thought it would do nicely) which I’m hoping to see flower this year as last they mainly keeled over and died when in bud for some reason (just possibly because the person in charge of watering the pot forgot *sigh*).

In other news, all three bee orchids are back and have been happily in leaf over the winter with no snails around to chomp them; and did I spot the seedling? Nope, not until I looked at the photos. To be fair, it is tiny at the moment, just under a centimetre long.

I’m not sure how quickly bee orchid seedlings grow but I’m pretty certain I didn’t see any leaves there last year. The first possible seed produced from the bee orchids growing in the pot would have been at the end of summer 2014, but they also flowered in 2015, so it could have germinated from either season. From memory I think it spends a year below ground after germinating before sending up any leaves. One thing I can say for certain is that bee orchids are definitely not monocarpic.

Comparing the I.Pot from March 2014 (left) to March 2017 (right) then, and you can see that there are a lot less species present now and in general it looks less full and the plants not as vigorous, as you would expect as I don’t feed it at all.

I finally cut back the thrift which died during the year – shame as I like that flower.

On the plus side, those little tiny seedlings are the eyebright which has done spectacularly well in the last two years and is a possible solution to conservation situations where yellow-rattle fails, as it did here. The skinny grass seedlings are silver hair-grass which I do like very much though I notice there are less of them this year. The grass-leaved vetchling (left) returns after a year’s absence, ditto common centaury (centre right), and nice to see the spring vetch (right) back and it did actually seed itself at the base of my doorstep though I doubt it will flower there before the soil dries out over the summer.

Also the pot now has three different mosses – all common, but nevertheless very welcome.

 

 

The I. Pot so far in 2016

As the eyebright has just started to flower- it’s a late summer flowering species, no idea which one – and I haven’t written about my I.Pot for a while I thought I’d do a review of the year so far.

The thrift pretty much died at the beginning of the year…a final slow and steady decline. For whatever reason, I find thrift does not like being in a pot much more than a year. Here it is on the left (I still haven’t removed it) with some of the many eyebright seedlings.

Those eyebright seedlings have been pretty much that size since the end of May.

The tiny spring vetch flowered and is now setting seed.

Only one of the bee orchids flowered, but they self-pollinate

and so seed is forming now. The two other bee orchids that flowered for the last two years were just small leaf rosettes this year, one getting a bit chomped by a snail.

The small scabious is now flowering – the plant
has stayed small and is a bit spindly although the quaking grass and meadow oat-grass have bulked up and flowered well this year…perhaps the reason that other things have not done so well.

So far this year then, moments of interest but generally looking a bit scruffy and a steady decline in the number of species growing present. I think I can see the signs of adult vine weevils too which might affect things further, but we will see.

A tale of two Globeflowers

 

Way back in 1918 J. W. Heslop Harrison wrote a paper on a survey of the Lower Tees Marshes in which he describes the “Trollius Bog” at Billingham Bottoms.

This exciting marshy area contained such delights as Marsh Helleborine, Grass-of-Parnassus, and Meadow-rue (which is rare with us up north) alongside plentiful amounts of Globeflower. Heslop Harrison was intrigued by the globeflower growing at only ten feet above sea-level when normally it is found high up in the hills at the head of the River Tees and to the north in Scotland. His friend Bolam sent him some roots from 1000 feet and 1800 feet from near Alston and others from about 500 feet at Wark in Northumberland, all of which he grew with plants from the Tees Marshes. Side by side he immediately notices differences; the upland form has greenish flower buds, the lowland has reddish brown. The upland has a short and rarely branching flower spike, the lowland was the opposite… and so it continues with a list of morphological attributes (see at end of blog). So different are they that he proposes for the lowland plant the name relictus.

Would you be surprised to hear that the bog was filled in during 1955 and the area around it made into a golf-course in the 1960’s? There’s no Globeflower left there now.

Then, in 1986, a small colony was discovered in a wet flush on the edge of a wood about 3.5miles (6km-ish) away to the west and on the same river system, at a height of 60m above sea level.

In 2003 a work colleague, Helen, went to visit the site, later collected seed and we grew it on into small plants. In 2006 she obtained a grant to start an introduction programme into the nearby woodland park owned by Stockton-on-Tees Council. We selected suitably marshy spots in which to plant it out but also so local people could easily see the plants as they walked around the park, and then we monitored the sites for a few years.

Ten years on and the plants are flowering in three of the six sites where we planted them, looking strong and healthy and flowering well in 2016. They don’t appear to be spreading – no obvious seedlings …but they are still there and seen by all who walk past.

The flower stems are branched and tall, some of the buds a bit reddish brown and so could well be the same genetics as Heslop Harrison’s lowland form, but then some are more greenish…though still with branched flower stems.

On the same day I went to visit the site of the small colony discovered in 1986 but there were no flowers to be seen; I had to hunt hard to find any plants and those were few and small. Why the change? Well, at some point in the 1990s more trees were planted on the valley side and they have now grown so large that their roots perhaps dry out the soil in the summer, or maybe the shade is now simply too oppressive.

Character.	Upland Form.	Lowland Form.
Flower Buds.	Greenish.	Reddish brown.
Colour of flowers.	Yellow.	Slightly deeper.
Bracts.	Not so leaflike and few.	Leaflike and many.
Flowering Spike.	Short and rarely, if ever, branching.	Long and branching frequently enough.
Seedpods.	Rich deep purple in colour.	Only very faintly so.
Leaves.	Much more compact owing to the closeness of the segments; on average not so long.	Freer in growth in all these characters.

Heslop Harrison’s table of the main differences between the two extremes of Globeflower.

Postscript:a week after writing the above I went to visit the garden at Tees Valley Wildlife Trust at Margrove where two years ago I transplanted a few large Globeflower plants from the recently shut plant nursery which grew the above Globeflowers (so they are of the same genetic stock). You can see how much they resemble the Upland form, which makes me wonder if it was the transplanting that made them grow like that…

What garden writers say…interpreted

I love reading about plants and gardens but sometimes, just sometimes, the same words get used a bit too often or there is a phrase that catches my eye and I wonder what the writer really meant, so I thought I’d write about that.

“Exquisite”  – really small flowers and fantastic detail, but I forgot my reading glasses so couldn’t see them properly enough to accurately describe them.

“Intuitive hybridiser” – seriously, I have never seen anyone so badly organized make such random scatty decisions and they are, quite frankly, very very lucky to have such a good end result.

“Innovative” – it looked completely bonkers; I’d be amazed if the owner understood what they were doing let alone me in the two seconds that I saw it between being offered cake, weak milky tea, and listening to stories, that I couldn’t possibly repeat, of that cruise they went on in 1976 with Alan Titchmarsh.

“It is probably…” – I’m about to make a really big sweeping statement to start this article and if you know anything about the subject I’m writing you’ll be able to pull it to shreds which is why I used the word probably. Thankfully most of you reading this have not got a clue and care slightly less, because let’s face it you only bought this magazine to look at the photos.

“My favourite is…” – hoping to get this sent to me as a freebie.

“We must garden with a freedom and ease that comes with a deep absorption and close affinity with the place” – what did you say the word count of the article had to be again?

“…romantic yet practical, experimental but traditional; an emotional experience, a garden of timeless quality…”-  As far as I can tell they are desperate for as many visitors as they can cram in, so I’m doing my best in this article to make sure no-one feels excluded.

“undulating topography” – I wrote “a bit bumpy”  earlier and the editor hates it if you repeat phrases in the same article, so this is what the synonyms feature of Word came up with.

“Planning a border is a little like organising a meal…” – except if you go to the supermarket for a ready meal it really isn’t, but I’m trying to make out that you are all amazing chefs preparing everything from scratch including growing your own vanilla pods (all my friends’ head gardeners do this), because there are some recipes to create attractively photographed food later on in the magazine.

“My column this month is rather unusual…” – I thought I’d point it out at the beginning in case you don’t notice.

 

I should really have been working rather than typing this; it’s a good job it’s a worthwhile contribution to garden writing otherwise it would have been a complete waste of a Sunday afternoon.

The Bee Orchids Flowered Again

The bee orchids flowered again; two out of the three plants, just like last year. It’s always exciting to see such a complex looking flower, more so when it’s sitting in a pot next to your door. They seeded and died down as usual and only the non-flowering one releafed again last autumn…at least at first….the other two finally made an appearance, but look small. Anyway, they definitely don’t always die after flowering which is interesting.

After 2014’s stunning failure to grow yellow-rattle, I scattered the seed of some eyebright I’d found in a car-park a few years back and it germinated, sat there quietly all summer 2015 and then suddenly was absolutely charming and full of flower towards the end of the year. Fingers crossed it has reseeded itself for 2016.

Some white clover germinated  – don’t know where the seed came from – but I decided to let it grow and grow it did. And grow and grow. It tumbled down the pot, flowered, the bees visited and I got cold feet about it and decided it was unbalancing everything; its leaves were so numerous that it dried the pot out quickly and it dominated so. I cut its top growth off to kill it, but left the roots in the compost so everything else wasn’t disrupted. They’ll rot off soon enough.

Other than that…mixed bag really. The silver hair-grass was much smaller this year, but the meadow oat-grass is gaining steadily and the quaking grass looked well. The thrift is gradually browning and dieing – not sure why, but they tend not to like being in a pot for any length of time. The small scabious flowered…just.

My Fritilaria uva-vulpis appeared and then all but one looked poorly and failed to grow or open properly. I’m not really expecting to see them this year; I wonder whether they caught a rot or just that they dried out at a crucial point – I’m not the most consistent waterer.

So, out of 26 species planted and another 11 that were either sown or turned up, I now have 16 left although there may be some hiding as seeds yet to germinate.

Verdict so far: I’m enjoying it…the decisions you make are similar to those in a real garden and it’s not been much hassle to maintain, although I think you would say it was more interesting than decorative…bit like its owner then.

Also I would like to point out that if I lived somewhere hot that peeling paint on the doorstep would be like totally fabulously shabby-chic and anyone reading this would be all…”I sooo love that doorstep in the south of France” rather than being completely judgemental about my lack of doorstep painting ability.