Wildflowers Work

Colette Beckham on why Wildflowers Work

It’s been a really busy summer here at Gain. We’re currently engaged by The Eden Project to develop Eden’s National Wildflower Centre and manage two major projects to seed parts of the existing A391 above St Austell and to supply seed and methodology for the soon to be constructed link road between St Austell and the A30. Both of these pieces of work will result in breath-taking wildflower landscapes along these road corridors and significant gains for biodiversity.

At Eden, the National Wildflower Centre has been harvesting the beautiful wildflower meadows in the outer estate which stunned visitors with their sheer beauty this year! One conversation with an NWC volunteer, struck a real chord. She recounted the reaction these landscapes had provoked in her elderly mother who wandered the fields at Eden in tears, saying she hadn’t seen a sight like that since she was a girl and she didn’t think she’d see it again.

Formerly Melon Car Park at Eden

Wildflowers have the power to provoke such an emotional response, one must wonder what the almost total loss of these landscapes from our countryside has done for our mental wellbeing, and what the potential gains are to be had for levels of mental health of a return of wildflowers to our landscapes?

The loss of wildflowers from rural areas is largely due to increasing intensification of agriculture, primarily after WWII with the almost wholesale shift away from haymaking to silage making and from permanent pasture to annual crops of Italian rye grass. The disappearance of even common flowers has been closely mirrored by plummeting populations of insects and farmland bird species.

The question of local provenance in the creation of habitats is an interesting one. There’s some debate around local provenance at sub UK level and whether this makes a difference to population resilience. Conversely, introducing seed from stock currently surviving a warmer/ harsher climate could bump up resilience to climate change. There’s also the question as to whether we create old-school wildflower meadow by taking a hay crop from permanent pasture or setting aside arable fields, versus a seeded meadow with a specific mix of flowers.

All things considered, there’s horses for courses. New wildflower landscapes are best used on degraded or urban sites where they can have maximum cultural and community benefits (the meadows at Eden were sown into temporary car parks). Rural sites with seed bank potential can be restored through adopting traditional hay meadow management, helped along with introductions of locally sourced wildflowers. Pragmatically, we need wildflowers back in our landscapes and so does wildlife. Multiple planned approaches are needed and quickly. The decimation of biodiversity is a crisis only paralleled by climate change, and its one that new wildflower landscapes have a role in solving.

Cornfield annuals in ‘Cow Pat Field’, Eden Project