WHERE HAVE ALL THE WILDFLOWERS GONE?

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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 38

WHERE HAVE ALL THE WILDFLOWERS GONE? PETER MARREN I think few would disagree that there are fewer wild flowers around in the countryside than there used to be only thirty or forty years ago. The statistics tell their own story – 90% of natural ‘neutral’ grassland gone and so forth. Whilst the diversity of species has actually increased over this period, with many more alien plants being recorded than ever before, the density of most native wild flowers has fallen. Although few species have become nationally extinct, extinctions at a local level seem to be much higher, especially in lowland, intensively farmed counties. This is the subject of my talk today. It has what I hope will be an unexpected ending. I don’t know if Martin has mentioned, but I live in a swamp – no I really do! – in a fairly rural part of Wiltshire, in the upper part of the Kennet Valley. I can look out of the window on what looks like a very attractive landscape. There are the water meadows of the River Kennet – lovely flat, alluvial grassland which has never been built on because the houses would just flood. On the slopes above there is what used to be chalk downland, but now mostly re-sown grassland and cereal crops, and on the top of the hill there is claywith-flints supporting mixed woodland with a broad apron of chalk shrubs. All of this forms a landscape which was essentially semi-natural in character, but has also been used for rearing sheep. The lambs were fattened up on the water meadows, which were given a winter dose of natural fertiliser by the ‘village drowner,’ who operated the sluice gates. The water in the fine network of channels would be drained off in the Spring so that the grass could grow fast enough for the lambing season. Later on, when the season got going on the downs, the sheep would move up there, and the local hazel wood provided convenient fencing for the sheep at night. So it was an inter-related landscape. All this came crashing down in ruins in about 1939 when the chalk downs were largely ploughed; now they are ‘set-aside’ and have lost most of their characteristic flowers. The woods on the top have been preserved, but underplanted with a lot of conifers grown to encourage pheasants. Most of the older trees were felled during the war, when Ramsbury was an American Dakota base, and the woods have grown shady. The only places you find a lot of flowers are around the edge. The water meadows down below are gradually filling up with Stinging Nettles. Over the last seven years I have seen them force their way through the grasslands and along the riverbanks, smothering the moschatels and other plants of alluvial soils. Not far away, upstream of me lives Jack Oliver, who has been studying the spread of Stinging Nettles; comparing today’s flora with that so faithfully and finely recorded by Donald Grose in the 1950s, gives some basis for the spread of the nettle. Briefly, it has changed from being the seventh commonest plant in Wiltshire to being the commonest. Its density has also increased, and the nettle is now present in every kilometre square, and in habitats where it was not present before. Not only this, it has also grown in size. They are taller than ever, with the record going to some woodland nettles on rich soil at over twenty feet long! Contrariwise, I have noticed a corresponding fall in one of the county’s most

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 38 (2002)


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