Getting the meadow cut - and why I hate sheep

At last we have gotten the meadow cut. This is an annual nightmare, as it is for a lot of other owners of small patches of grassland. In the end a local contractor, Phil, came to the rescue, borrowing a huge John Deere tractor and flail off a farmer friend to come and do it for us. We're very grateful!

We are typical of many of a new demographic in the British countryside, the micro-landowner, with just a few acres – we have about 3+ acres of wildflower meadow to cut. Ours is very bio-diverse, indeed some of it quite exceptionally interesting, a rare survival of a pre-intensification grassland. But getting it cut, let alone doing what we should be doing, getting it cut and raking off the cut grass as hay, is always really difficult. The problems of doing so bring one up against two things: the problems of actually achieving good medium-scale habitat management, and the realities of global agriculture.

In the past, a local farmer would be happy to come and cut the grass for hay, problem solved. But no-one wants hay anymore, although horses are happy to eat it, silage is better for most animals and a lot easier for the farmers – apart from anything else, hay has to be left to dry, which is not always possible in the climate of west Britain. 

(Silage, by the way, is grass cut young and lush and fermented to make a very digestible animal feed which can be kept for up to two years.)

Not any more. Coming and cutting small acreages is simply not worth it for farmers. The last two years we had a silage cut, which is done in June when the grass is lush, but it is not worth it for them to come back – it involved a small army of huge machinery to come quite a few miles. Anyway a silage cut removes the grass before a lot of wildflowers have performed, let alone seeded. In many places it can, I believe, be a disaster for biodiversity. See what I wrote about it in Austria a few years ago. But it did remove the nutrients for those years – as we all know now, removing grass/herbage removes nutrients, so reducing the nutrient level of the soil, which reduces grass growth and so therefore encourages biodiversity. 

You would think that one or two of the local farmers might have cottoned on to the fact that the area now has lots of people like us who want small scale cuts done, and come and cut them at a premium price. Not a bit of it. Like many semi-marginal agricultural areas most of them are the ones who haven't had the initiative to go and do something else; they seem completely stuck in the same old way of doing things: overgrazing the land with EU-subsidised sheep and mechanically producing silage, preferably from monocultures of ryegrass. This is one of the problems with small-scale farming – most of those who practice it never made an active choice to do it, they are just following in their fathers' and grandfathers' footsteps. There is the occasional bright spark who has realised that this is all completely uneconomic and diversified into the new rural economy – niche farming and food processing: artisan cheeses, fruit cordials, single-variety cider etc. Fortunately this does seem to be growing in Herefordshire.

 

Even if some of the local agricultural community did get the initiative to offer small meadow management services, they would face the next problem – the 'kit'. All modern agricultural machinery in Britain is vast, made for the plains of Kansas, or at least Lincolnshire - the places where a totally different landscape actually feeds us. Agriculture is subject to an elementary economic law – the Law of Diminishing Returns, which basically means that scale is everything (except if you can buck the Law by developing a niche market, which is essentially what so-called 'organic' production, farm shops and food fairs are all about). The Law means that there is no longer a market for small or medium-sized tractors etc, so anyone who enters the small acreage market inevitably has to be a vintage tractor and farm machinery addict.

One answer, in the neighbouring county has been the Monmouthshire Meadows Group whose mission statement declares "Our aim is to conserve and restore flower rich grasslands in Monmouthshire by enabling members to manage their own fields and gardens effectively". Their website lists contractors for all sorts of wildflower meadow conservation services and apparently they did club together a few years ago to buy an Austrian small cutter and baler. There is talk of something being set up in Herefordshire, which is very good news indeed.

So, what is so special about our bit of grassland?

We were here for a year before we realised just how special one bit of our land was – it had an incredibly dense sward with very little grass, but instead was made up of two wildflowers – fleabane and silverweed, plus rushes and sedges, plus a whole lot of other wildflowers. There were a few orchids, three the first year. Our neighbour (a v. old-fashioned smallholder) had sheep on it, we gradually reduced them, and as we did so, the flora burgeoned – we now have thousands of spotted orchids. As time has gone on, we have seen this very interesting flora slowly spread – it is actually a flora which is more typical of 'dune slacks' – wet areas of sand dunes, on the south Wales coast, than anything else I have seen around here. In parts I am reminded of alpine herbfield – as there is so little grass.

I suspect that there was once an awful lot more of this kind of biodiverse grassland around. I also suspect that if the amount of sheep-grazing were reduced we might seen the development of a lot more. Sheep are the curse around here – the deforested scenery of much of Wales and the borders is constantly nibbled to within a millimetre of its life by them. Unlike cattle, which are no longer rough grazed in the area (what Americans call ranching) they tiptoe around bracken, which continues its onward march, smothering vast areas. The sooner we give up subsidising farmers to keep these biodiversity-gobbling beasts in marginal areas like this, the better. A landscape of woodland (economic use = biomass?) and small patches of economically useless but biodiverse grassland like ours, would be much more preferable. 

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If you like this blog, why not check out my e-books, which are round-ups of some writing I did for Hortus magazine back in the early 2000s, along with an interview with the amazing Beth Chatto. You can read them on Kindle, or Kindle packages for smartphones or the computer. You can find them on my Amazon page here. You will also find my soap opera for gardeners - currently running at eight episodes.

SUPPORT THIS BLOG

I write this blog unpaid (of course) and try to do two postings a month, to try to provide the garden, wildflower and plant-loving community with information, inspiration and ideas. Keeping it coming is not always easy to fit into a busy working life. I would very much appreciate it if readers would 'chip in' (as we say in England) and provide a little financial support. After all, you pay for magazines and books, and it is only for historical reasons that the internet is free. Some money coming in will help me to improve quality and frequency, and to start to provide more coherent access to hard information, which I know is what a lot of you really want. So – please donate now!! You can do this through PayPal using email address: noelk57@gmail.com

Thank you!

And thank you too to the folk who have contributed so far.

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Is Naturalistic Planting almost Mainstream now? !

Intermingling as a planting strategy works well at Little Ash Bungalow with things like Knautia macedonica, which often needs support for its rangy stems.

A few days in Devon leading a tour group for Gardens Illustrated magazine was a good opportunity to drop into some gardens I like, but in some cases haven't managed to get to for years. Reflecting on what we saw, I think its fair to say that naturalistic planting is really making an impact. One place we went to was the Garden House, well known for this approach, and now with a new head gardener in charge who is very much a follower of Keith Wiley, who made the garden what it is. However it is two other gardens I'd like to talk about here, all the more important for their being more low-key, and in terms of what most people can do in their gardens, realisable.

Here I'd like to look at the planting in these two gardens, concentrating on some key aspects of naturalistic planting: density, intermingling, self-sowing, spontaneous native plants and integration with nature.

 

Little Ash Bungalow, is a Yellow Book garden, which Helen Brown has made into a new-style plantsman's garden. It illustrates well just how effective the higher density of planting that is so crucial to naturalistic planting can be when used with good plant combinations - for which this garden is an excellent example.

 

 Conventional planting with its separation of plant from plant and bare soil now seems so much a thing of the past. Whilst we are still a long way from the density of natural plant habitats, the modern planting style has a kind of voluptuous freedom about it, which is a joy to see.

 Helen's garden is mostly herbaceous but some strongly structural stuff as well. Grasses make good space fillers.

 

Whilst here there is not much of the conscious repetition with the true intermingled planting style aims at, dense naturalistic planting is such a good way of managing and making the most of the wide range of plant forms which herbaceous perennials take, and which people like Helen like to cram into their borders. NONE OF WHICH are to be found growing on their own in splendid isolation in nature - ok, there are exceptions but they are very few; Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) is one which does, but that is another story. The overwhelming majority of perennials grow cheek by jowl with many others, and physically intermesh and hold each other up, interpenetrate each other, so there is often a visual intermingling from a limited number of plants. The planting at Little Ash illustrates this extremely well.

 Self-sowing, self-seeding, whatever you would like to call it, is a crucial part of the new naturalism. Although progressive gardeners from Margery Fish onwards have promoted it, it is now really only coming into its own. Burrow Farm garden is a good place to appreciate it. This expansive and ambitious garden has been made over many years by Mary Benger on land which has presumably been gradually acquired from her husband's farm - a successful example of agricultural diversification, and one which, because it is open to the public as a business means it is a very accessible place to get to, to see how traditional English mixed planting style is morphing into a distinctly naturalistic one. Self-sowing is a big part of what makes Burrow Farm successful visually.

The sheer scale of Burrow Farm and its very subtle transitions from one area to another is quite something, and of course it illustrates well that naturalistic planting is the obvious way to manage such extensive areas. I would love to see Mary being put in charge of Wisley for a few years.

 Scenes like this which counterpoint very conventional and almost cliched English garden features like bird baths with seeding perennials would once have been seen as a sign of neglect. How far we have come!

 

The partial acceptance and management of what turns up in the borders on its own is another crucial aspect of naturalistic planting. Here is hemlock! Yes! The stuff that killed Socrates. There is even some giant hogweed lurking down by a pond.

 Finally, there is the integration of cultivated plants with more fully semi-natural habitat like these Iris ensata matching the colours of some wild orchids - common spotted (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) but which seems to hybridising with some garden ones (D. foliosa) with their deeper colours. Managing the boundaries and borderlines between what a naturalist would unhesitatingly call 'habitat' and the gardener 'border' is one of the ecological-artistic skills of the new naturalistic gardener.

It is very heartening to visit these two gardens, both created by people who are not perhaps self-consciously part of the 'new perennial' movement, but whose work illustrates so well what the more noisily evangelical ones amongst us in planting design have been banging on about for years.

Of course doing good naturalistic planting does depend greatly on understanding plants. In collaboration with My Garden School I have published the first of what is intended to be a series on planting design. It is very much a textbook, written with a global audience of non-English speakers in mind, for anyone and everyone who is involved with planning or planting vegetation, from amateurs to landscape architects. This first book is aimed at understanding the basics of plants through their ecology.
Here it is on the amazon site.


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If you like this blog, why not check out my e-books, which are round-ups of some writing I did for Hortus magazine back in the early 2000s, along with an interview with the amazing Beth Chatto. You can read them on Kindle, or Kindle packages for smartphones or the computer. You can find them on my Amazon page here. You will also find my soap opera for gardeners - currently running at eight episodes.

SUPPORT THIS BLOG

I write this blog unpaid (of course) and try to do two postings a month, to try to provide the garden, wildflower and plant-loving community with information, inspiration and ideas. Keeping it coming is not always easy to fit into a busy working life. I would very much appreciate it if readers would 'chip in' (as we say in England) and provide a little financial support. After all, you pay for magazines and books, and it is only for historical reasons that the internet is free. Some money coming in will help me to improve quality and frequency, and to start to provide more coherent access to hard information, which I know is what a lot of you really want. So – please donate now!! You can do this through PayPal using email address: noelk57@gmail.com

Thank you!

And thank you too to the folk who have contributed so far.

********