My Balanced Horizon pal and I went for a stroll last weekend to a little known stretch of River Tyne tributary, the Papana Water near Garvald to explore a stunning wildflower meadow.
The wild flower meadow is a labour of love created by the nearby Papple Steading. A better spot to experience nature and have a quiet picnic would be tough to find. We came well prepared having stopped en route at the excellent Carfrae Farm Shop to pick up supplies.
Scotland, like the rest of the UK, has seen a sharp decline in its species-rich wildflower meadows since the 1930s largely as a result of agricultural intensification, scrub encroachment and urban development. This decline appears to be intensifying over the last 40 years. The meadows that have survived are often fragmented into isolated patches, in some cases protected through environmental designations. In other cases, ecologically sympathetic landowners have sought to restore areas that had been lost.
Surrounded by the birdsong of skylarks and reed buntings and buzzing of insects it’s blatantly apparent that these rare and fragmented habitats are biodiversity honeytraps. They can support potentially hundreds of plant species from common daisies to orchids to meadow buttercup and meadowsweet. They are also a magnet to pollinators like bees, butterflies and hoverflies together with small mammals like field voles.
Meadows can also provide a grass crop that acts as high nutrient fodder for livestock and offer vital ecosystem services particularly through their ability to act as sponges during periods of flooding thereby reducing the risk of downstream property damage.
Their cultural value should also not be overlooked. Meadows like these have inspired Scottish artists like Cadell, Peploe and Eardley and writers like Robert Burns, Norman MacCaig and Sorley MacLean. More recent books by Kathleen Jamie commonly return to ecological themes around wildflowers like her poem ‘Daisies’.
In the Scottish Borders a project is growing that shares many similarities with Muir to Forth. The Tweed Meadows Project is working to reverse wildflower meadow losses. It seeks to work in partnership with sympathetic landowners to reintroduce mowing and grazing management to restore neglected meadows. We will look to build connections with this excellent initiative with the aim to replicate this exemplar near Garvald.