The heady scent of an insect-rich wildflower meadow can be hard to beat.

Yet changes to commercial farming practices since the 1930s have meant that we have lost 97% of these precious habitats. 

The good news is that with a little foresight, we can help to bring them back, as Helen Baczkowska from Norfolk Wildlife Trust explains.

Sitting in a sunlit summer meadow is one of the most magical wildlife experiences I know and it takes only moments to become aware of the thrumming life among the grasses. Taller plants include ox eye daisy, the purple thistle-flower heads of black knapweed and yellow meadow buttercup. Beneath them might be creeping stems of lesser bird’s foot trefoil, gold lady’s bedstraw and, if you are lucky, an orchid or two. Among these will be spiders, beetles and bees, butterflies like meadow browns, small coppers or gatekeepers, plus the endless song of grasshoppers and crickets. If you are able to stay until evening, moths will emerge, often pursued by bats skimming over the grass and the soft flight of a barn owl hunting for voles. 

The origins of meadows lie in the open grasslands that grew as the ice sheets retreated from Britain millennia ago. Wherever there were grazing herds, fire, floodwaters or storm damage in a forest, meadow plants would have thrived. These open areas were exploited by prehistoric people, first for grazing and later for hay, the dried and stored grass once vital for keeping livestock through the harsh months of winter. 

Hay remained a vital crop on most farms until the 1950’s, when tractors replaced farm horses and many farms, especially here in East Anglia, moved away from raising cattle or sheep. Meadows were, quite simply, no longer required – silage and cereal feeds provide more sustenance for cattle in winter, while grasslands near villages and towns were lost to development. In 1984, the Countryside Commission estimated up to ninety-eight percent of lowland meadows had been lost since 1945. The result, it was quickly realised, was a decline in invertebrates, including pollinating insects, in bats, small birds and reptiles.

In recent years initiatives to restore or re-create meadows have ranged from large schemes on farms or local amenity land to ‘no mow’ May, which encourages gardeners to let grasses and wild flowers grow in their lawns. I even have a friend who talks of her ‘sky meadow’ in a series of pots on her balcony. As a lover of meadows, this makes me hugely happy and I have also been delighted that part of my role at Norfolk Wildlife Trust has meant increasing the profile of these habitats. Firstly, where existing old meadows remain, my colleagues and I are sometimes able to provide advice on appropriate care – this covers Local Wildlife Sites (sites in every county listed as being of high value for wildlife), on designated Roadside Nature Reserves and in churchyards, which are sometimes the best and oldest fragment of meadow left in a parish. 

Management work usually means either careful grazing or replicating the age-old seasonal regime of cutting for hay and collecting up the cuttings. In the past, hay was cut around midsummer, when the grass is nutritious and the long, hot days helped it dry. Unless you are managing land to produce a decent crop of hay, you can be a bit more relaxed and cut sometime between late June and mid-September, perhaps leaving about 10% uncut each year as winter shelter for butterflies and shrews. On small areas, the raked up cuttings can just be composted (perfect for sheltering grass snakes). 

Secondly, our Wilder Communities Workshops help people across Norfolk learn how to take action for wildlife on their patch – this might mean creating a meadow on the edges of the local recreation ground, learning to scythe as a way of caring for it or how to set up and run a local volunteer group.

We also include meadows in the work we are doing to establish a wilder landscape across Norfolk. This means working with landowners to create corridors and stepping stones for wildlife – the aim is a county where there is more space for wild species, where people are able to enjoy and act for the wildlife on their doorstep and where habitats are better connected so that species can move more easily, especially in the face of a changing climate.

Meadows and even fairly rough grassland are important elements of this landscape-scale work and to do this we support farm clusters and projects like the Chet B-Lines project, where landowners and local communities work together to make more places for wildlife. This approach is at the core of our Wilder Connections project – a pilot to see how we can improve connectivity and habitats in the South Norfolk Claylands.

I live the Claylands, a rolling landscape of clay hills and chalk stream valleys, and have known the area all my life. A lifetime of exploring the open commons and some of the finest remaining meadows in Norfolk might be why I feel so passionately about this area and these habitats. An unusual group of wild flowers live here and include sulphur clover, a bright yellow clover, spiny restharrow, a tiny pink shrub and the aromatic pepper saxifrage.

A few years ago, myself and Henry Walker at the Norfolk Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) realised that these species were vulnerable, just clinging on in a few last places, so, with the help of dedicated band of contractors, we set about collecting seed and ‘green’ (undried) hay to help us enhance a few species-poor areas of grassland. The project has been a huge success, with several new meadows now thriving and the work expanding under the Wilder Claylands project. Creating new meadows in the Claylands has taught me a lot – not just how to do it, but how to hope that these magical places can thrive again in our countryside and towns.