Wildflowers - Founder Opinion Piece
It's humbling to think that we have lost 97% of our wildflower meadows since the 1930's, and half of our insects since the 1990s.
Here at WildEast, we believe meaningful change comes only when every part of society engages in nature recovery.
We cannot protect something we do not know exists, which is why WildEast works to champion positive nature-based action taking place across the region, right now.
This month's newsletter takes a deep-dive into the delightful world of the wildflower; here WildEast Founder Olly Birkbeck describes his love for our fragrant flowering friends.
From left to right 1: Norfolk Wildlife Trust volunteers work on a wildflower meadow. 2: A Gatekeeper butterfly 3: Broadland District Council leaving space for wildflowers
Lady’s Bedstraw, harebell, mouse ear, viper’s bugloss, bird’s foot trefoil. I’m creeping along in a crouched-over position like a semi evolved human (much like those looking for mushrooms in the autumn). I inspect each little treasure poking through and cry out with unbridled rapture that rings out across the meadow every time my guess is echoed by the app on my phone. Oxeye daisy – too easy. Something better.. Devils bit scabious? YES! YES!! Honestly. I do butterflies too. But that’s much harder. Damn things never stay still.
The names of things! Whether coined by some bufty old retired colonel with a twinkle in his eye and a scar from Balaklava, or a young icini warrior using Prunella Vulgaris or ‘Self Heal’ on his wounds from sticking one to the Romans, we simply don’t know, but they thrill us. They’ve been fluttering here for millennia, trampled by cattle, battered by storms, eaten, parched and plundered, but still they come to brighten up our lives and teach us about the landscape of which we are a part and the long botanical history that unfolds here. Is it Oregano or Wild Marjoram? Well that depends who’s asking. And where. And when!
From left to right 1: Staff at South Norfolk and Broadland District Councils volunteer their time to create a wildflower meadow. 2: Making space for wildflowers 3: Scything work by Norfolk Wildlife Trust Volunteers
I say “still they come”. Well, not really. 98% of our wildflower meadows have disappeared. Replaced by monoculture cereals, intensive grazing, or stupid houses built on floodplains which presumably will return to yellow vetchling and ploughman’s spikenard once the chickens of canalisation and climate change come home to roost, plunging all into the restless silt.
I’m a middle-aged man who has travelled widely, fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, loved wildly and had my arse kicked for it, screamed with exhilaration atop precipitous mountains and felt the adrenaline of new ventures, but none of it has allowed me to feel the miracle of life, the sheer beauty of existence, than walking in these meadows. Their multi layered complexities bind us, and the many other creatures here to this glorious landscape, as it has over the epochs.
This sense of belonging is what WildEast is all about. Our culture, the names of these wild flowers and how they seep into our food, our songs, our medicines, is reflected by the geography in which it has evolved. To have swept it all away in a few short decades is an act not only of vandalism but of self-harm. And for what? Endless buckets of slop to feed captive animals for us to gorge on, as if they were never animals at all, while the wilderness shrinks to nothing. We don’t need this, folks.
From left to right 1: Wildflowers bordering a Suffolk path 2: A nature reserve owned by the Suffolk Flora Preservation Trust 3: Birds-foot-Trefoil
The last of the turtle doves that call in these hawthorns and feed on the fumitory and the fat-hen, the skylarks that scream from dizzying heights above me, and the weird little stone curlew, clinging onto her nesting site in the face of probable extinction, have evolved with us in this landscape for millennia. Our grazing animals and even our cultivating machines have benefitted them. But now the mind-blowing scale of it has tipped the balance and it’s down to us to tip it back. And it starts in our back yards, our farmyards, our churchyards and our school yards. We join the dots back up.
Without wildflower meadows, more than any other habitat, numbers of pollinating insects will continue to nose dive. We may have lost over 50% of our insects in the last two decades, purely by our own hand. Just think of it. We’ve been tilling the soil, building houses, hunting animals for 10,000 years plus, but in two decades we’ve halved arguably the most important thing on earth for our own survival.
We used to mind about this sort of thing. We used to know the landscape. Our children’s imagination and wonder, their resourcefulness and knowledge, was forged in the landscape. Now we walk alone to an uncertain future. Only as a society, together, can we alter this fatal flight path. Pledge your wildflower meadow today!
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