You don’t need acres of meadows to help wildlife, says Dave Goulson – just a few square metres can make a real difference. Illustration Rosanna morris
One hundred years ago, England and Wales had more than seven million acres of flower-rich meadows, cut for hay in summer and occasionally grazed by livestock. They teemed with butterflies, bumblebees and other insects, providing food for skylarks, corncrakes, lapwings and much more besides.
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The switch to silage instead of hay as a winter food for farm animals made these meadows redundant. In a 50-year period in the middle of the 20th century, 97 per cent of our flower-rich meadows were swept away, a massive loss of habitat for our precious wildlife. Only small scraps remain; isolated islands of biodiversity surrounded by inhospitable terrain.
Restoring meadows has become a priority for many wildlife charities, and some exciting projects are underway. Most of us don’t own a meadow and may feel that there isn’t much we can do to help, but, if you have a garden, you’d be wrong; recent research shows that even tiny areas of wildflowers can attract significant numbers of pollinating insects.
Wildflower plots attracted 111 per cent more bumblebees
Janine Griffith-Lee, one of my PhD students at the University of Sussex, recently asked home-owners to sow a 2m x 2m square of wildflower seed mix in their gardens. An equal number of gardeners were asked to do nothing, to act as controls. In their first year, the wildflower plots attracted 111 per cent more bumblebees, 87 per cent more solitary bees and 85 per cent more solitary wasps compared to the control gardens. It really does seem to work, and is simple to do.
Even without sowing wildflowers, simply leaving small patches of lawn unmowed until late summer boosts butterfly numbers. Many meadow butterflies rely on various grasses as food for their caterpillars. In my own garden, the long grass areas are brought to life in summer by the lolloping flight of meadow browns, gatekeepers, ringlets and marbled whites, while occasionally large and small skipper butterflies zoom past in a blur of orange.
Gardens with even small areas of long grass had significantly more butterfly species
Lisbeth Hordley of the charity Butterfly Conservation recently published data based on the charity’s long-running Garden Butterfly Survey, which showed that gardens with even small areas of long grass had significantly more butterfly species and more individual butterflies. Incidentally, this study also found that encouraging ivy and allowing it to flower was another big driver of butterfly abundance in gardens, providing holly blue butterflies with food for their caterpillars and red admirals, comma butterflies and a host of other pollinating insects with nectar in autumn.
Patches of long grass also provide a home for grasshoppers and bush crickets. Grasshoppers sing for mates in the daytime, while crickets chirp gently in the evening and night. I love to sit quietly with a coffee or beer in hand and listen to these charming little creatures.
Traditional mown grass with neat stripes isn’t beneficial for wildlife and is a lot of work to maintain
You might think that one small patch of wildflower meadow in your garden can’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things, but it all helps. There are about 22 million private gardens in the UK, covering more than one million acres. If most had their own mini meadow, and were managed with nature in mind (for example, pesticide free, with a small pond), that could really make a difference.
Road verges sown with wildflower seed mixes had 25 times as many flowers
Imagine too if we could persuade local councils to come on board, so parks, roundabouts and road verges also had meadow areas with long grass and wildflowers. Another of my students, Lorna Blackmore, found that road verges sown with wildflower seed mixes had 25 times as many flowers, 50 times as many bumblebees and 13 times as many hoverflies compared to the typical mown grass verge. They look beautiful too. Flowering road verges could help to connect our garden mini meadows and surviving patches of ancient wildflower meadows, and together could create a national network of flower-rich habitat.
All of this comes with no cost other than the outlay for some wildflower seeds, and there would be savings for councils in terms of reducing mowing. We’d have to alter our expectation of what gardens and urban greenspaces look like. Traditional mown grass with neat stripes isn’t beneficial for wildlife and is a lot of work to maintain, but it looks neater than shaggy wildflowers. If we could learn to love this wilder look, then the bees, butterflies and birds would thank us.
Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, and the author of Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse.
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