How to read your meadow
June is the perfect month to enjoy grassland flowers and many of us have a ‘pocket meadow’ of long, flowery grass in our churchyards, chapel yards, cemeteries and also our gardens. As well as being beautiful these small pitstops for pollinators can have great wildlife value within both urban and rural landscapes. Sometimes however, a meadow area seems to have less and less flowers as the years go by and it can be hard to know why. If this is the case in a meadow that you manage the grasses may give you a clue as to the cause of this problem.
Native grasses can be divided into fine and coarse species. The fine grasses are shorter, about 30cms, with fine, needle-thick stems and small leaves. Fine grasses allow plenty of room for wildflowers too. Common species include Meadow grasses, Bents and Fescues.
The coarse grasses are larger, sometimes over 1m high, with thicker stems, broad leaves and a tussocky base. In a sward of coarse grasses all but the largest, strongest wildflowers will be swamped and lost, their seeds will not reach soil to germinate and small plants will be overshadowed and pushed out. The main coarse grasses are Cocksfoot, False Oat-grass and Yorkshire Fog.
Whilst a flowery meadow may contain both fine and coarse grass species, if the proportion of coarse grasses increases to more than just occasional plants here and there then you may have a problem. Coarse grasses thrive in places with higher soil fertility and infrequent cutting. If you are cutting your meadow once a year, quite late in the season, this increases fertility and the strength of the coarse grasses. Raking up cuttings is vital for a meadow, if left uncollected the cuttings rot, increasing nutrients and swamping other plants. So, if coarse grasses dominate your meadow then cut more often, earlier in the summer and rake hard so that bare soil is revealed.
Whilst meadows vary depending on soil, location and weather, a good rule of thumb is to leave a meadow uncut for three to four months and no longer. You can cut in March or April and then again in July or August or, if you don’t cut in spring then cut by mid-July. This does mean cutting off some flowers but it really knocks back the coarse grasses, favouring fine ones. After a year or two you will start to see wildflowers return. Also, most meadow plants are perennial so the flowers will still be there even if they didn’t set seed and you can always cut around a clump or two of late flowering species.
Harriet Carty, Diocesan Churchyard Environmental Advisor, harriet@cfga.org.uk
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