In my line of business – running a consultancy that specialises in habitat creation of various kinds – clients often ask me for a meadow. My usual reply is, ‘What exactly do you mean?’ That’s not me being obtuse; it’s a genuine question, because quite often what the client understands as a meadow is a world away from what pops into my mind on hearing the word. On pressing them further, the client will often go on to say, ‘Oh, you know – poppies, cornflowers, that sort of thing.’
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And therein lies the problem, because you don’t find poppies and cornflowers in a meadow. They are arable weeds, adapted to live in an agricultural system where the soil is disturbed on an annual cycle. A meadow, on the other hand, is made up of perennial species, left to grow undisturbed year after year.
To understand the differences better, it helps to look at the origins of these two types of vegetation. In the aftermath of the last ice age, as the climate warmed, plants and animals slowly recolonised a Britain largely scraped bare of vegetation by glaciers. Before the English Channel formed, there was no physical barrier to this gradual invasion, and all the species we regard as truly native arrived by this route. Then along came our ancestors, Neolithic farmers looking for new territory to inhabit. They found a Britain cloaked in a dense blanket of woodland, sprinkled here and there with clearings created by the activities of herds of deer, bison and wild boar. In those constantly shifting clearings, our native plants of grassland and heath clung on to a precarious existence.
You don’t find poppies and cornflowers in a meadow. They are arable weeds, adapted to live where the soil is disturbed annually
Those early farmers set about cutting down the trees to create space for their settlements and the fields they needed for their crops and livestock. Around each new hamlet they created pastureland and a patchwork of strip fields in which to grow the ancestors of wheat, oats and barley. The early breeds of sheep and cattle, although hardy, struggled to find sufficient food through the long, cold winters of these northern isles, and so some Neolithic agrarian genius hit upon the idea of cutting the grass of the pastures, drying it in the late summer sun and storing it as feed for the winter months.
The perennial flowers of glades and woodland edges gradually moved into these new fields, and found themselves in a brave new world where the annual cutting regime prevented the shade-giving trees from ever encroaching. Gradually, over the centuries, they synchronised their reproductive cycles to flower and set seed in time for the farmer to cut them down and dry them in the August sun, turning the grass from time to time which handily shook out their seeds to ensure future generations.
And that, in a nutshell, is what a meadow is: a grassland habitat, originally created to provide hay, supporting perennial flower species, such as small scabious, cowslips, agrimony and common spotted orchid, and managed by an annual cut. A thing of tremendous, if subtle, beauty and a great rarity in the modern countryside.
The poppies, corncockle and cornflowers that are often mistakenly associated with a meadow have a rather different story. Surprisingly, many of them are not even truly native. As our distant ancestors domesticated a handful of apparently unpromising grasses in the fertile crescent of the Mediterranean, they found their fields coloured by a group of spectacular, but short-lived, annual flowers of disturbed ground. These species live fast and die young, relying on their abundant seed to provide the next generation. They would have moved very happily into the new cultivated fields, where farmers would harvest them along with the crop and sow them again in spring into freshly ploughed earth.
When these early farmers migrated northwards, they took the weed seeds with them as contaminants of their crops, lacking the technology to separate, literally, the tares from the oats. Eventually, these opportunists piggy-backed their way into Britain where, ever since, they have brightened up the corners of arable fields with their fleeting beauty. But make no mistake – poppies and corncockle do not a meadow make, and left unmanaged their splendour will fade.
In a nutshell, a meadow is a grassland habitat, created to provide hay, supporting perennial flower species and managed by an annual cut
Meadows – in the broadest sense – have received a lot of media attention lately, popping up in various guises at flower shows and notably at the London Olympic park in 2012. Despite the misinterpretation of what a meadow is, both annual and perennial mixes do have their place in modern plantings. The annual ‘arable weeds’ are quick to germinate, quick to flower and provide a long-lasting, colourful display. The downside is that the ground needs digging over and reseeding each year to maintain a good display. Perennial or ‘proper meadow’ mixes have a shorter flowering season and are more subtle in their range of colours, but will only need to be sown once and given an annual cut.
Recommended meadow seed suppliers
Perennial meadow seeds: Landlife, the environmental charity based at the national wildflower centre in Mersyside, wildflower.co.uk
Further reading
Meadows by Christopher Lloyd (Cassell Illustrated, 2004)
The Wildlife Gardening Forum, wlgf.org; Plantlife, plantlife.org.uk
Wildflower Meadows by Margaret Pilkington (Papadakis, 2012)
Where to see meadows
Your local Wildlife Trust will almost certainly have a meadow nature reserve near you; look up their reserves map at wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife/reserves
Some of the best include:
• Chimney Meadows, Staffordshire
• Cribbs Meadow, Leicestershire
• Cricklade North Meadow, Wiltshire
• Kingcombe Meadows, Dorset
• Mottey Meadow, Staffordshire