City Blooms

Lucy Cooper

I have thoroughly enjoyed Sarah Raven’s Butterflies, Bees and Blooms BBC Two Wednesday nights. Even more so I’ve been thrilled by the number of people contacting us wanting advice – 55 in the last few days alone! Luckily, we have a fantastic suite of grassland advisory leaflets, produced by Harriet Hollaway – one of our graduate interns. You can download these for free from our website.

Wednesday night was the final episode of Sarah’s programme and focused on how our Cities can play their part in bringing more colour and buzz to our parks, road verges and other open spaces – which are often boring grass monocultures. We like this – a lot.

In 2008 The Grasslands Trust got involved in a project with the local council and the Durham Wildlife Trust to transform an acre of short mown grass at Riverside Park, Chester le Street, County Durham. The restoration process was relatively straight forward and saw wildflowers such as ox-eye daisy flourishing within a year.

A couple of years later with the introduction of plugs and more seed – (all locally sourced) and this is what visitors to the Riverside Meadow would see – an absolute riot of colour with knapweed, yarrow and devil’s bit scabious attracting masses of bumblebees and butterflies. The response from visitors to the park has been equally encouraging.

The cost of carrying out a project like this is nominal – especially if the local community and volunteers can get involved . Without the need to mow every two weeks, Councils can save thousands of pounds in maintenance work. In addition to benefiting visitors – which are a fair few given the park is opposite the cricket ground – local school children have also got involved. Funding from The Grasslands Trust paid for the creation of this stunning interpretation board designed by the children of Nettlesworth Primary School.

And we are delighted to say, that this project has also won three environmental awards.

Lucy Cooper, Chief Executive, The Grasslands Trust

Meadows for Sale – should we buy them?

We’ve just spent the best part of 18 months trying to buy a farm in Herefordshire – Bury Farm SSSI. This is a spectacular place  and probably the most important single area of lowland meadows and pastures (a priority habitat) left in England – the farm is about 70ha and nearly half of that is really lovely wildflower meadows, with some fantastic downland and orchards to boot. We successfully raised £1.7M to fund the purchase and management of the site, but in the end the owners decided not to sell to us. Naturally this was very sad for us, but that’s life. At least the farm is still in very sympathetic hands (after all the owner had resisted the temptation to plough up all his wonderful meadows and grow potatoes) and it’s a SSSI, so that gives some protection.

Now just last week another important area of meadows in Herefordshire is on the market, a farm called The Birches, near Kington. Here’s the agent’s website. This farm is much smaller than Bury Farm – 25ha. But there are some lovely meadows and some other very interesting features, including ancient hedgerows, kettle-hole ponds and what looked to me like drumlins, this being a postglacial landscape. The meadows include one of Herefordshire’s last populations of Frog orchid, a rapidly disappearing grassland species. There’s also plenty of that really good unimproved grassland indicator Dyer’s-greenweed, a few green-winged orchids, and plenty of other nice plants. The owner has looked after these meadows really well, and they were in Countryside Stewardship for 10 years, though not recently.

Knapweed, Harebell, and other meadow plants, The Birches

The farm’s up for sale, including farmhouse, outbuildings and cottage. No price is suggested by the agent, they are just waiting for offers I expect.

One out of 14 fields at The Birches is a Local Wildlife Site; the other 13 fields (many of them unimproved grassland) are entirely unprotected. It would be the work of a couple of days to plough them all up and grow potatoes on them. It is without question that if these meadows are sold to an unsympathetic owner they would be under immediate and dire threat of destruction.  What’s to be done?

There’s been a flurry of emails between Hereford Nature Trust, Plantlife and ourselves. The site is well known as a good site for lowland meadows, which are now vanishingly rare outside nature reserves and SSSIs. Can we buy it, can any NGO buy it?

Buying land these days is a complicated  business, as we found when we worked on our Bury Farm proposal. Long gone are the days when it was possible to easily raise funds to purchase land just to save it. Nowadays funders such as HLF want to see a well-developed rounded project, which includes community involvement, learning opportunities and so on as well as conservation.

Should we buy it? Shouldn’t we be in a position now in this country where good quality grassland habitats do not need to be bought by charities in order to safeguard their future? Are these not some of our most special places? Are they not on a par with mediaeval churches, tithe barns, neolithic stone circles, or art by Turner or Constable (or Hockney!).

There are ways to ensure the meadows at The Birches are protected – they could be notified as SSSI for example. I’m exploring this possibility with Natural England. The other way to protect meadows such as these from intensive agriculture is the EIA (Agriculture) Regulations. I have blogged about these many times before – in theory they should protect any semi-natural areas from the effects of intensive agriculture. In practice, as we have shown, they are mostly ineffective. One reason they don’t work is that landowners are unaware of the value of wildlife-rich grasslands, and we are trying to remedy this by advocating a much more comprehensive grassland inventory, up to the quality of the ancient woodland inventory. We are getting somewhere with this argument but it’s a long way off still.

It would help landowners know what they had, if sale particulars included such details, and perhaps pointed out that the land would be subject to the EIA (Agriculture) Regulations. The particulars for The Birches just states the land is “permanent pasture”, which means absolutely nothing, other than it isnt arable land. There is not even any mention of the Local Wildlife Site.

No doubt this will progress quite quickly and I will keep you posted as to what happens.

Gangster Grasslands

Stunning grassland on the Durham coast that is managed as part of our Magnficient Grasslands project in the area.   Did you know that the beaches on this stretch of coastline were immortalized in the 1971 gangster movie “Get Carter” starring Michael Caine?   Now cleaned up, the beaches used to be known as the black beaches of Durham because of the coal waste that was dumped on them by local collieries.

Croeso i Garmel – Welcome to Carmel

Charli Evans, Community and Volunteering Officer

Rain, hail, rain, sleet, rain, snow; I did mention the rain didn’t I? Pretty much the usual West Wales winter rather than the Christmas card scenes we had last year and the year before. However because the weather hasn’t exactly been crisp and even the winter work programme on the reserve wasn’t disrupted too much.

Contractors were able to get onto the reserve and coppice or thin the trees in three coupes (small blocks of woodland) and The Grasslands Trust’s volunteers have cleared trees from limestone grassland, maintained reserve signs and undertaken a small mammal survey. Some volunteers even found time to undertake a chainsaw course on the reserve.

Bank Vole captured during small mammal survey

The Grasslands Trust’s Carmel Reserve SSSI; NNR; SAC: is as you can see a well decorated or rather designated protected area. Special Site of Scientific Importance, National Nature Reserve and Special Area of Conservation. The reserve is of UK importance for its woodland and grassland habitats and the biodiversity within a relatively small area is high as the reserve straddles the northern boundary of the South Wales coalfield. The geology includes Limestone and Silicate rocks and so there are acid, neutral and lime loving plants present.

In the eastern section of the reserve is a turlough, a small lake that fills and empties via swallow holes.   It is the only example in Britain and the reason that the eighty six hectare Reserve and over two hundred hectares of surrounding land were designated a SAC.

The Grasslands Trust manages over fifty hectares of the reserve and in addition owns twenty hectares of nearby land within the SAC. The reserve is a mix of fields and small woodland blocks with one area in particular an intricate mosaic of woodland, glades and small fields. The Trust manages both the grassland and woodland areas and since the Trust’s involvement with the reserve significant progress has been made to re-establish the woodland glades, remove scrub from grassland areas and reintroduce coppice management.

Since coppicing work was carried out in December, what some people think looks like the ramparts of a medieval castle have come to light! Although castles are quite thick on the ground in Wales this particular example of large scale masonry is a little more modern. Because the limestone rock was and still is a valuable resource the area is peppered with quarries. The reserve itself has a number of impressive examples. The two quite large quarries on the section the Trust manages were abandoned over a century ago. Nature has pretty much reclaimed them and also the four Victorian lime kilns that were abandoned at the same time.  Now the ash and hazel has been coppiced one of these kilns is now clearly visible and as you can see it’s perhaps not surprising that some visitors have mistaken it for some sort of fortification.

Victorian Lime Kiln

Carmel National Nature Reserve and The Grasslands Trust’s other properties at Carmel are open to the public throughout the year and there are miles of trails by which visitors can explore the many wildlife habitats to be found there.

Volunteers repairing reserve sign

Shock Horror gardening has an environmental impact

There’s a rather silly article in yesteday’s Independent on Sunday reporting on a report about the ecological impact of gardening. But actually there are some quite interesting statistics quoted – and I’m keen to track down the report which looks quite interesting (from the RHS).

For example domestic peat use for gardening causes the release of half a million Tonnes of CO2 (presumably they mean CO2 equivalent) a year. This is a massive carbon footprint! The total footprint for UK agriculture is 20 million Tonnes. Although the biodiversity loss associated with peat extraction was mentioned, no effort was made to quantify it’s impacts – as I have blogged before there is no equivalent metric for a product’s biodiversity footprint. And 25 m2 of paving has a footprint of 1 tonne of CO2 equivalent. Which is not that surprising when you think about how much energy is required to extract the rock from the ground and move it around.

One thing the article missed, which I hope the report did not – is the Carbon stored in lawns. Let’s say for arguments sake that each hectare of lawn stores 100 tonnes of  carbon (10kg per metre), this may be a slight underestimate. There are 30 million houses in England – let’s say each one has 10 square metres on average. That’s 3 million tonnes of Carbon in Englands garden lawns, equivalent to 12 million tonnes of CO2 stored away safely. That’s an enormous carbon store which we should all be working hard to keep in the ground.

But the whole premise of the article is “shock horror gardening is bad for the environment, because it has an environmental impact.” Which is a nonsense – everything we do has an environmental impact – nature conservation has a carbon footprint and a biodiversity footprint- hopefully a positive one.

A better question to ask is “what choices do we as a society make and how do these choices affect the impact on the environment.” We can all make choices including in how we garden, which reduce our  carbon, water and biodiversity footprints.

Spring is nearly sprung

Spring is on its way and with it the sight of glorious cowslips….

We hope you have been enjoying the contributions from the new recruits to our team blog.   Next week we hope to post first blogs from Durham and Carmel with news of our exciting projects in these parts of the country.

Droughts, Nitrates and the Habitats Regulations

Across central and southern England, rainfall in January was again below average  – the Met Office produces excellent anomaly maps here.

The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology produces a monthly hydrological review which was published yesterday.This confirms that drought conditions across a swathe of England are deepening. Rivers from Cornwall, to Worcestershire across to Lincolnshire are reaching lows normally associated with summer’s end not late winter. Groundwater in aquifers which supply large parts of England with drinking water are also approaching or at historic lows with wells from Sussex to Dorset, Shropshire to Lincolnshire showing their driest levels for this time of year in 40 or 50 years.

Low river flows affect wildlife both directly and indirectly. Direct impacts include a lower water oxygen level which affects river fauna, but a general drying out of streams and wetlands as groundwater levels drop, damages a far wider range of wildlife.

There’s a more insidious impact too – pollution. Our rivers take sewage effluent (what’s left after the sewage has been treated) from sewage plants and move it away from our towns and cities. Rivers also accumulate pollution that runs off agricultural land – this includes Nitrates, Phosphates and pesticides that are used by farmers.

With this in mind, I came across an interesting case recently which emphasised to me how beneficial regulation can be in tackling what are thought to be intractable environmental problems. The Habitats Regulations implement the EC Habitats Directive in England and they are currently being reviewed, in case they are acting as a brake on development, or placing “ridiculous costs on British businesses, as the Chancellor described them in his Autumn Statement.

Poole Harbour in Dorset is a European Site, both for its birds, other fauna and also its important range of wetland habitats. As such it is protected from development which might damage its wildlife, by the Habitats Regulations. There are algal mats developing on wetland habitats in Poole Harbour and these are affecting the species that use the harbour. These algae are spreading in response to Nitrates which are being delivered to the harbour by the River Frome. Although parts of the Frome Valley are lovely and there are a few nice damp meadows along the river (which is itself a SSSI), the Frome passes mostly through productive farmland, including intensive grassland and maize grown for dairy farming, on its way to Poole Harbour. The Frome picks up Nitrate which runs off that farmland.

The Duchy of Cornwall (ie Prince Charles) continues to develop Charles’s model development at Poundbury, next to Dorchester, and they want planning permission for the next phases of the development. The extra few thousand houses in the next phases will inevitably produce extra sewage and that sewage is treated at Dorchester’s sewage farm before its remaining effluent, with Nitrate included, is pumped into the Frome – to wend its way to Poole Harbour.

Natural England, who are responsible for implementing the Habitat Regulations, have pointed out to the planning authorities, that under the Habitat Regs, “any plan or project” which might have “an adverse effect on the integrity of a European Site” must be subject to Appropriate Assessment (AA), which is a form of environmental assessment. The Habs Regs are unusual in that they require proof of no adverse effect – normally the onus is on the regulator to prove an effect. So the Poundbury Development must be assessed to see whether the sewage effluent is going to damage the special interest features of Poole Harbour. The planning authorities carried out the AA and, no surprises, have concluded that they cannot be absolutely confident that there will be no adverse effect, because of the extra Nitrate.

It’s simply too expensive to use “end of pipe” technology to reduce Nitrate in sewage effluent leaving Dorchester’s sewage plant. So the Duchy have agreed to reduce the amount of Nitrate being used on the farmland they own in the Frome Valley, to compensate for the increased Nitrate coming from the development. I don’t know the exact details but presumably they will work with their tenants to get them to convert to organic systems or enter the appropriate Entry Level schemes which ultimately lead to a reduction in the Nitrates used on that farmland, and therefore much less Nitrate running off into the river.

So have the Habitats Regulations been a brake on development? Are they gold plated? Well, in this case, not only have the Regulations been used to enable the housing development to take place in a way that doesn’t cause downstream environmental damage, but they have also been used to encourage catchment-wide sustainable farming techniques, thereby encouraging sustainable food production, reduce water pollution and reduce the waste of precious resources.

If the drought conditions persist, the issue of Nitrates in rivers is only going to become ever more important, as rivers provide people with drinking water, and Nitrates in drinking water are a recognised human health risk.

Thanks to Phil Sterling County Ecologist at Dorset County Council for enlightening me about this case.