Pensthorpe Natural Park in North Norfolk is home to a diverse variety of habitats.

Its wet and dry meadows, fed in part by the River Wensum, host a heady mix of wildflowers.

Natalie Douglas is from Pensthorpe and says the services that they deliver to nature cannot be underestimated.

To understand the habitats of the UK, you have to start with the end of the Devensian Glaciation around 12,000 years ago. The open landscape left as the ice sheet retreated was, in effect, the blank canvas onto which our vibrant wildlife was painted as it colonised from the south. In time, through the process of succession, most of what we now call the UK became wooded, though these woods varied enormously from place to place thanks to soils, water, temperature and the behaviour of wild animals.

The next major impact on our habitats, after 1,000s of years of a landscape dominated by varied woodland, came in the Neolithic, some 6,000 years ago. We know from analysis of ancient pollen preserved in wetland mud that at this stage the landscape quickly became much more open, as a result of people settling on permanent farms. This continued into the Bronze Age, by which time the UK landscape was very largely deforested by human activity, as it has been ever since.

Broadly speaking, meadows — in their many forms — arise through the interaction of plants, insects, fungi, soils, water, climate and human land use over hundreds, if not thousands, of years in places where native forest has been felled. For the sake of simplicity, the word meadow is used here to describe both pasture (where livestock is grazed) and hay meadows (where hay is harvested in summer to feed livestock through winter). Some purists would use the word meadow only to describe the latter.

Pensthorpe is unusual — and wonderful — in that it has both wet meadows by the River Wensum and well-drained meadows on glacial sand. One of the most precious habitats at Pensthorpe, in terms of its history, rarity and biodiversity is the wet meadow lying just south of the Wensum. This is an ancient habitat, that has been preserved for centuries by grazing and perhaps traditionally by hay-making. This human use prevented willow scrub from re-establishing itself. Crucially it also removed nutrients. 

These days most farmed land is treated with nitrate fertilisers, specifically to improve soil fertility. This is great for producing crops and flawless rye grass for commercial grazing, but very harmful to soil and biodiversity. The diversity of plants and — in consequence — invertebrates and other wildlife in an ancient meadow is precisely the result of low available nutrients, and the competition which has occurred for them. In treated fields, nitrate fertilisers give particular plants a competitive edge, so they swamp other species. In ancient meadows, diversity is driven by competition for scarce nutrients, leading to a wonderful variety of species. The wet meadow at Pensthorpe has cuckoo-flower, devil’s-bit scabious, ragged robin, fen bedstraw, water mint and a host of other specialist plants of wet meadows which have never been driven out by drainage or nitrate fertilisers. As a result, it is also home to countless specialist invertebrates.

The dry meadows at Pensthorpe, some which can be visited on the Pensthorpe Explorer, have a very different history. These were agricultural fields until fairly recently, but have been deliberately sown as wildflower meadows, with species including oxeye daisy, wild carrot, common knapweed and musk mallow. These native wildflowers have thrived in the well-drained, sandy soil and are an unrivalled nectar store for millions of insects in summer. They are managed, to remove nutrients and prevent incursion by scrub by a variety of methods. Some grasslands are left unmanaged and long, for hares to hide in, other areas are cut short for grazing wildfowl. Mowing and grazing encourage wildflowers and pollinators, whilst in another field we are managing for ant hills to create the rare ‘antscape’ habitat.

These meadows have been created in exactly the way you too can create a meadow in your own garden. Mown grass is all very well — and is infinitely preferable to a non-natural surface such as paving or plastic grass — but by letting your grass grow you can turn your garden into a nature reserve, heaving with life. The simplest way to go about this, and usually the very best way to start, is just to leave patches of your lawn to grow long from spring until late summer. You can then start mowing them, as you do for the rest of the lawn, in autumn. This will give you an idea of what flowers are already in your lawn, just waiting for the chance to flower, feed bees and other insects, and set seed. Allowing your lawn to grow long and flower, without sowing seed, is the most organic and wildlife-friendly way of making a meadow. For nature always knows best.

It’s understandable, though, that you might want a dramatic display of flowers and insects in your meadow in the first year. This being the case, you might wish to plant some plugs in your wilder areas of lawn. Make sure you buy them from a peat-free nursery which only sells wildflowers from legally-gathered UK sources of seed. Wild carrot, oxeye daisy, cowslip, birdsfoot trefoil and common knapweed are all hardy and easy to establish and all excellent for insects. 

The best time to sow new species in your meadow from seed is after your summer cut, when grasses are weakened and you can scrape open patches in the sward with a fork. This will help seedlings become established. The very best source of seed is local wildflowers (with landowner permission, of course, and gathering seed only from common species). Local wildflowers are the best adapted to local soils and climate and they are genetically appropriate to your local populations. Nonetheless, specific species can also be purchased from wildflower companies, again taking care to use only seed from peat-free companies which use legally-harvested seed from UK sources.

At Pensthorpe we are proud that our hundreds of acres of meadows are home to a huge variety of plants, fungi, invertebrates and other organisms. But we recognise that nature needs connections right across the landscape in order to thrive. Your own tiny patch of garden meadow — starting this very summer — can be a stepping stone in nature’s recovery right across East Anglia.

Richard Spowage, Reserve Manager at Pensthorpe, says “Grasslands are amazing habitats often overlooked, but they are vital for a whole range of species. Without good management we can easily lose these special places.”