The wildflowers of England are in rapid decline; almost one in five - 345 species - are under serious threat and nearly 100 more are under pressure. The past half century has been a disaster for plant life in the UK. In that time 98% of our wild flower meadows have been destroyed. This account of a year in the life of one of the few remaining meadows is glamorous, fierce, factual, joyous, celebratory and tragic. It is also educational and a warning. The meadow it depicts is a thing of such beauty as to make a heart melt and it is now uncommonly rare. Where most meadows in England contain about five or six varieties of grass, this one has one hundred and thirty plus thousands of orchids. It also supports species of butterflies that are highly endangered and birds that have disappeared in other parts of the country.
In high season the meadow lies, a dream of beauty, in its barren surroundings of rye-grass and silage grass, glowing every colour under the sun, like the background to those miraculous mille-fleur tapestries where birds and rabbits sit and scamper in stunning, strewn, paradisiacal fields spattered and scattered with plants and flowers of every size and hue. It makes one understand that the great tapestries of the Middle Ages are not an artist’s dazzling inspiration of the celestial fields, but an accurate representation of what he saw around him and which still exists in pockets of England. The plants and flowers shown in the book were picked and pressed and photographed as they appeared and in the process the authors record something sublime that has almost vanished and which once made England one the most beautiful places on earth.
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Picture this. It is a late summer evening in the gloaming, the curlew is calling and the hedges are dense, smelling, lit by the glow of woodbine. Our meadow lies silent: the flying life that turns it into the Heathrow of the insect world has gone to rest. From the woods that surround the fields come the purrings and whirrings of the nightjar. All is still. Down the lane, between the hedges, come two lunatics...
The chronicle of the past 50 years of farming is a catalogue of devastation. To take just one county,
the county where we live: Natural England, the conservationist organisation, now knows of fewer than 20
wildflower-rich meadows in Somerset, when there were said to be well over 700 in 1984. For years these wonderful
fields designated as 'unimproved' - there's newspeak for you.
Now, the thing to know is that a healthy living landscape is not a green landscape. That field that you walk
past, or see from your car window, so emerald green, so smoothly uniform, is a desert, composed of a few
strains of highly bred grasses and supporting little or no insect or wildlife.