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Tucked away on a country lane, a small field bursts with yellow and pink flowers. Quail and whitethroats call from the thick hedges and the plants, including common centaury, yellow rattle and marsh and common spotted orchids, bounce with hoverflies and butterflies.
More than 150 plant species have been recorded on Sayer’s Old Meadow, in north Norfolk, England, which is remarkable when there was just one – oilseed rape – growing there 21 years ago.
This transformation has happened without sowing any commercial wildflower mixes or making any other expensive interventions such as deep ploughing or top-soil removal, often undertaken when arable land is “restored” to nature-rich meadow. Instead, the four-acre field was simply cut for hay once every summer, with an abundance of wildflowers naturally – and rather mysteriously – finding their way into the field.
These findings, published in a scientific paper in Restoration Ecology, could transform the approach to recreating flower-rich meadows. Conservationists and landowners are pushing to revive old meadows because 98% in England and Wales have been destroyed over the last century.
“Everyone is planting and seeding wildflowers, but sometimes we’re not patient enough,” said Carl Sayer, a professor of limnology and freshwater ecology at University College London and lead author of the paper. “You don’t always have to reach for that expensive commercial wildflower seed mix. We’ve forgotten that nature has known what to do for quite a long while.”
The fact that Sayer shares his surname with the meadow is no coincidence: it is owned by his father, farmer Derek Sayer, 86, and has been part of a tiny traditional farm for generations. The land was ploughed and fertilised and sprayed with pesticides as was conventional in postwar farming, but Derek Sayer stopped cultivating it in 2005 because the small field was always “hit and miss” at producing good yields.
Springs feeding the Glaven chalk stream rise in the meadow and parts of the field were always boggy. The land was “abandoned” for five years and became a forest of thistles before Carl Sayer began studying its growing diversity, beginning an annual hay-cut in 2011.
Fifteen years on, thistles and other arable annual weeds have almost completely disappeared – without any human intervention – to be replaced with a flower-rich perennial sward, which is growing more biodiverse every year.
For Sayer’s father, watching farmland run wild with “weeds” was challenging but he gradually became more interested in his son’s experiment. “He started off saying: ‘What are you doing, Carl? What a load of rubbish.’ Now he’s like: ‘How many orchids are there this year?’” said Sayer.
When Derek Sayer arrived to look at the field during the Guardian’s tour, he still cast a fierce countryman’s gaze over it, checking for “weeds” such as ragwort. “It looked a bit strange at first but I quite like it now,” he said.
Each August, a neighbouring farmer cuts and removes the hay, which he feeds to his cattle, grateful for the biodiverse hay crop. “Much more diversity is a tonic to cattle because it’s full of medicinals,” said Carl Sayer. “The monoculture of a rye-grass field may not give them everything they need. The old farmers had it right.”
Cutting it each year prevents the meadow becoming an oak woodland. The sward is full of baby oaks and sallow, and a patch of the field which hasn’t been cut regularly is now filled with hummocks of sallow as high as a house: still wildlife-rich habitat but not as rare or much-needed as flower-rich meadows.
Removing the grass growth each year with the hay-cut also reduces the nutrients, enabling more delicate wildflowers to flourish. Several years ago, yellow rattle found its way into the meadow. This is known as “the meadow maker” because it parasitises grass and creates space for other wildflowers, although Sayer said the meadow was thriving without it.
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“Everyone will tell you this approach [not sowing wildflowers] doesn’t work unless you’re close to a seed source. But no one has done a long-term study like this,” he said.
The surrounding land is intensively farmed and the nearest populations of some of the rare flowers now found in the meadow are at least 3 miles (4.8km) away. One possibility is that seeds have been brought in on the hooves or coats of wild deer that roam the countryside.
“Everyone’s accused me of bringing it in on my upturned trousers but I don’t wear upturned trousers,” joked Sayer, who was wearing shorts.
Sayer’s Old Meadow looks noticeably different from what some conservationists disparagingly call generic “McMeadows” created from popular wildflower mixes which are dominated by white oxeye daisies and purple knapweed. The advantage of “self-willed” meadows is that they are filled with locally-appropriate plants which are likely to be more genetically diverse than those found in commercial seed mixes. This type of meadow creation was also much cheaper, said Sayer.
Since last year, barn owls have taken up residence in a field-edge nest box and hunt over the field. The Sayers allow local people to walk in it and an informal path now runs down one side. “Everyone in the village loves it, people walk through it and respect it. It’s working to make people happy as well,” said Sayer. “It’s the thing I’m most proud of in my life. I love it. It’s hope – we can recover things. We just need to do less in the recovery process.”
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