Take twenty-five people, throw in a few spades and five thousand plug plants in a field. Four days ( and a bit of hard digging ) later Dove Stone has a new flower rich grassland.
As mentioned, creating a wildflower grassland is a lot of hard work so many thanks to both the Barclay’s Bank team from Salford for giving a day of their time to help out with the planting and for supporting activities like this in local communities and to all Dove Stone’s regular volunteers for lending a hand through rain, thunder and lightning to make it happen. In future years you should be able to see some spectacular results of all that hard digging and planting.
Preparation of the grassland started in the summer with putting up fencing to control grazing and flailing the rough grasses. We hope that the field will eventually be full of plants such as Oxeye Daisy, Autumn Hawkbit, Common Toadflax, White Campion, Sheeps Sorrel, Harebell, Yarrow, Cowslip, Mouse-eared Hawkweed, Common Knapweed and Red Clover. And then there’s Yellow Rattle.
Yellow Rattle gets its name from the loose seeds that produce a rattling sound in the plant’s papery seed shells. Yellow Rattle has an important role to play in Dove Stone’s flower rich grassland. Being semi-parasitic, it feeds off the roots of grass and through doing so restricts grass growth thereby allowing other species to thrive. So each of the five thousand plugs planted was accompanied by some Yellow Rattle seeds.
Next year, the Yellow Rattle should flower in June and set seed in July. When the plant dies away it should leave behind gaps in which new wild flowers can further establish. Mowing also provides new sites where Yellow Rattle can establish as it keeps the grass sward open and is an important part of the care of a wildflower meadow. Not only simply being a pretty plant, Yellow Rattle is also the food plant for the Grass Rivulet moth larvae and is a favourite nectar source of bumble bees. There's been good news for bumble bees elsewhere with five of the most threatened bees in England, including the rarest shrill carder bee, making a bit of a come back. For more on this check out this link http://www.rspb.org.uk/news/details.asp?id=tcm:9-261841
It seems timely to be writing about creating a wildflower grassland with the publication of the results of a study undertaken by Kew Gardens and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The study reports that twenty two per cent of the world’s flowers are at risk of extinction. And it’s not just those plants ( such as plants in rainforests ) that somehow seem a step removed from both our UK habitat and our consciousness. You might be surprised to read that the Common Snowdrop ( Galanthus nivalis ), whilst widely naturalised in the UK, is amongst those plants listed as near threatened. This is because of habitat loss due to an increase of land development in areas of central and eastern Europe.
The report also finds that one of the greatest threats facing plants today is the conversion of natural habitats for agriculture or livestock use. The very tangible act of creating a wildflower grassland seems like a step towards re-dressing this, even if this greatest threat to plants is being discussed on a global level. For more on this report and plantlife in general as well as info on really interesting projects such as the Millennium Seed Bank check out Kew’s site: http://www.kew.org/. The 2010 International Year of Biodiversity’s site is also worth a look: http://www.biodiversityislife.net/?q=home