A royal rescue for wild flowers in peril

Even in England, wild flowers are beginning their finest weeks. Primroses have been excellent. The woodland anemones have run them close and now cowslips are up and opening on road verges. Those supreme wonders, the snake’s head fritillaries, have lasted well in damp meadows since early April’s weather turned glacial. It will soon be time for bluebells to take over, as lovely a sight as any in nature.

Meanwhile, humans have been hell for wild flowers. They have farmed 97 per cent of Britain’s flowery meadows out of existence since the 1930s. In recent decades, local councils have joined the killing, sending out mechanised cutters as soon as the wild flowers on roadsides begin to become tall and colourful. Have wild flower-related accidents, if any, on country lanes fallen significantly as a result?

The supreme folly has been this cutting’s timing. In gardens, wild meadows should not be cut before August, so that wild flowers have a chance to seed themselves and multiply. Verge-slashing in May is idiotic, at odds with councils’ professed commitment to the “environment” or even “indigenous” planting.

The tide may at last be turning, helped by the charity Plantlife, which has put together a good booklet on “Managing Grassland Road Verges” (plantlife.org.uk). Finally, councils have begun to review their “best practice” and delay their cutting or limit it to a single narrow strip beside each road.

Meanwhile, flowery meadows have more friends than ever. Do we have to lose something in order to value it fully? One of their best friends is the Prince of Wales. Since its early beginnings, open spaces in his country garden at Highgrove, in Gloucestershire, have featured wild flowers, of which the most vigorous, as usual, have been white ox-eye daisies.

In 2012, the Prince marked the 60th anniversary of his mother’s coronation by launching a plan for Coronation Meadows, sites across Britain in which wild flowers would be fostered. I do not think they were a particular brief of his father, Prince Philip. In the next six weeks, Coronation Meadows will be reaching a peak. Wild flowers are wonderfully indifferent to human death, reminding us that life goes on nonetheless. I hope these meadows may be a consolation to the royal family after their recent loss.

The Prince has just written a foreword to a notable new book on them, Wildflowers for the Queen (Wildflower Press, £50). Ninety Coronation Meadows, he remarks, have already been designated, ranging from the Isle of Mull to Cornwall. More can still join the scheme (coronationmeadows.org.uk for details).

They do not have to be in wild, open country. In September 2016, the Queen’s Meadow was inaugurated by schoolchildren with the help of the Prince himself in a corner of London’s Green Park. So far it has been most notable for ox-eye daisies, as irrepressible as ever, and meadow buttercups, which are about to light up non-Coronation grassland anyway.

Profits from this big book will go to the charity Plantlife. The compendium’s mastermind is the photographer Hugo Rittson Thomas, known for his camera portraits of members of the royal family, including a mirror-image of the Queen, and for three photobooks on gardens, one on great gardens of London, two on “secret” gardens elsewhere.

From Cornwall to Scotland, he has travelled to catch Coronation Meadows in the light that most appeals to him. He quotes Ted Hughes on how dawn “squeezes the fire at the core of the heart”. It never squeezes mine, red hot though it can be from 10am onwards. The dawn light has given some of the book’s big photos too dramatic a look, catching the meadows at Sandringham or the chalkland at Darland Banks in Kent or the culm grassland at Greena Moor in Cornwall at a time that conflicts with when flower lovers see them during many more hours in the day.

Meadows are not easy to photograph, least of all in close-up. Rittson Thomas likes dark backgrounds for his sprays of individually picked meadow flowers. Against one, the good old echium, or viper’s bugloss, looks decidedly unnatural to my mundane eye.

Descriptions of the meadows are broken up by brief sections on celebrities’ experiences of meadow gardening, all in a good cause. From Julian Fellowes to Nicholas Coleridge, chair of the V&A museum, they are full of interest. Like many of us, Alan Titchmarsh remarks how he rebelled against advice to strip off the rich top soil on his two acres of newly bought farmland and remove it before sowing meadow flowers into the layer beneath. Instead, he had the existing soil “freshly tilled” and then sowed wild-flower seed directly into it by hand from a bucket.

“I marvel each year at the changing scene,” he writes, beginning with a “rash of cowslips” and progressing through ox-eye daisies (yet again), pale blue scabious, marjoram and, recently, some orchids. However, he sowed on to Hampshire chalkland, not rich Lincolnshire loam. He was helped, surely, by its relative poverty. Novice meadow-makers should not expect to match his results on richer soils elsewhere. They need expert advice first, which this book is not written to provide.

Art dealer and TV art star Philip Mould describes a slower progress. After a failed first year, he learnt about yellow rattle, the spreading roots of which combat vigorous grasses and are essential to most meadows’ success. Enjoying the eventual results, he quotes with approval from Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in which four girls in “gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which . . . remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary”.

Steady on, Mould: chapter 23 is pregnant, I would say, with suppressed itching. The girls were in their Sunday best, en route to morning church, when they found themselves blocked by an overnight flood. Happily, gorgeous Angel Clare chanced to be coming down their road in a pair of sensible boots, thereupon “four hearts gave a big throb”. To help them, he lifted each one across the flood, spurred on by Tess “meeting his glance radiantly”.

I do not want midges in my underpants. In late summer, meadows are messy. They are fine for farmers, but this book focuses on them only at their best. In the Coronation scheme, orchids proliferate, from man orchids in Surrey to green-winged orchids at Marden Meadow.

In one day, mechanised farmers can destroy a meadow-flora that has taken decades to develop. It is great that the landowners in this book, often with big estates, are fostering replacements, but a full reinstatement of our losses is still beyond most agricultural budgets. Even ragged robin is becoming an imperilled species.

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