Since the 1930s, 97% of wildflower meadows across England and Wales have disappeared due to pressures from intensive agriculture and development. 

We want to go beyond caring for the 3% that are left.  

The Meadow Makers project will work with landowners to restore and create, as well as monitor and manage, 100 hectares of species-rich meadows over the next 15 years. 

We’ve received a record-breaking £8million from National Highways to restore meadows, from Dartmoor to north Yorkshire, to help people nature and wildlife.  

Why do our meadows need saving? 

Meadows and species-rich grasslands are magnificent, in many ways. They are extraordinary ecosystems, with native wild plants at their heart.

Species richness in grasslands can significantly improve carbon storage in the soil, which is a vital tool for addressing the climate crisis. They also have fungal networks covering thousands of miles, can be home to up to 140 species of wildflowers, provide flood mitigation and provide nutrient-rich grazing for livestock.

• What are grasslands?

Over the next 15 years, seven sites – six in Devon and one in North Yorkshire – will undergo significant grassland restoration with our team of meadow specialists. 

Every meadow is home to different species and habitats. This project will require unique care to allow the meadows to bloom wilder than ever. 

How we’re restoring 100 hectares of meadow: 

The Meadow Makers project will contribute towards our goal of restoring 100,000 hectares of species-rich grassland by 2040. 

Three Hagges Woodmeadow is a 10-hectare reserve near York, and an incredible example of woodmeadow habitat which hosts an abundance of plants and invertebrates. Visitors can connect with nature among native British trees such as Small Leaved Lime Tilia cordata and Hazel Corylus avellana, which grow alongside some of our most iconic meadow species such as Ox-eye Daisy Leucanthemum vulgare and Lady’s Bedstraw Galium verum.

Welcoming a new reserve is a transformational moment in Plantlife’s history. It presents us with a unique opportunity to deliver our ambition to protect and restore wild plants and fungi, in meadows and woodlands for communities across the UK.

Ian Dunn, Plantlife’s CEO shares his excitement as we celebrate our 24th reserve:

“We were absolutely delighted to have been chosen by the Woodmeadow Trust to become the new guardians of their activities and assets. We are thrilled to be the new custodians of Three Hagges Woodmeadow and wider woodmeadow work moving forward and consider the combination to be a major contributor to Plantlife’s ambition for delivering a world rich in plants and fungi.”

Natur am Byth! is a cross-taxa partnership, which means many different organisations are working together to save a variety of species – from insects and plants to birds. This is important as  when any species is lost from an ecosystem, it can make the whole ecosystem weaker and less able to cope with change, regardless of what kind of species it is.

One element the Natur am Byth programme focuses on is the mini-wonders of the Welsh Marches. The area has a rich diversity of mosses and liverworts, lichens, fungi and insects. These species all have one thing in common: they are generally pretty tiny. Many people just aren’t looking closely enough to spot them –and that’s what we want to change.

Why it’s important to find and record rare lichens

But before we can get started protecting rare species, we need to know where we’re currently at. ‘Baseline monitoring’ gives us a picture of how our target species, and the sites where they exist, are doing – we can then use this data to plan how we’ll manage those areas for nature. We can also track how these species recover in the future.

The Natur am Byth partnership is Wales’ flagship Green Recovery project. It unites nine environmental charities with Natural Resources Wales (NRW) to deliver the country’s largest natural heritage and outreach programme to save species from extinction and reconnect people to nature. Thanks to players of the National Lottery over £4.1m from the Heritage Fund was awarded to the partnership in June 2023. NRW has contributed £1.7m and the Natur am Byth partners have secured a further £1.4m from Welsh Government, Arts Council of Wales and a number of charitable trusts, foundations and corporate donors. These include donations from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and significant support from Welsh Government’s Landfill Disposals Tax Communities Scheme administered by Wales Council for Voluntary Action (WCVA).

Botanical plant names can tell you all kinds of things about a plant. Often, they are descriptive as in Saxifraga oppositifolia – literally, the opposite leaved rock breaker. Sometimes, they tell of the habitat in which the plant is found or its particular use as in Salvia pratensis – the cure from the meadows.  

Personally, I prefer the descriptive names; the ones that guide me to where to find the plant or how to identify it. Colloquial names for plants, and those in other languages, can be equally descriptive, and tell of the things that people thought they should be used for, and why they were significant enough to warrant a name. 

There are a few here in Wales that I love. Cronnell (Globeflower) just for the way it sounds, Merywen (Juniper) – because it’s so different from any of the common English names and Derig (Mountain Avens). 

In his book ‘Flora Lapponica’ (1737) Linnaeus wrote “I have called this plant Dryas after the dryads, the nymphs that live in oaks, since the leaf has a certain likeness to the oak leaf…. We found it, a gorgeous white flower with eight petals that quivered in the cool breeze”. The Dryads were demigods, and their lives were tied to the life of the oak tree they inhabited. In Greek mythology a tree could not be cut without first making peace with the dryad that inhabited it. 

The Welsh name for the plant takes the same likeness to oak into account with the name coming from ‘dâr’ and ‘ig’; ‘Dâr’ means oak (Derwen means Oaktree) and ‘ig’ is a reduction of the Welsh ‘fachigol’ which means diminutive.  

It wasn’t until 1857 that the plant collector William Williams with discovering Mountain Avens in the mountains of Eryri, high above Cwm Idwal. Later, Williams was accused of having planted the species at this site, as it wassuspected that he planted rare species to further establish his notoriety as a botanical guide. It wasn’t until 1946 that a second site for Derig was discovered by Evan Roberts in the Carneddau.  

Mountain Avens in Wales today

Derig is still only found at just two sites in Wales yet there are a few other sites, including on Yr Wyddfa, where the plant community with which it shares its two known homes exists.  

What is Reverse the Red?

Reverse the Red is a global movement aimed at raising awareness of the work being done to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss and ensuring the survival of wild species and ecosystems.

The initiative brings together a coalition of scientists, advocates, and partners who use data-driven and science-based approaches to plan and act for species conservation.

The movement acknowledges and celebrates the efforts of organisations, communities, and people in protecting and restoring endangered species listed on a Red List, with the goal of reducing their vulnerability and eventually removing them from the list. Reverse the Red Website

What is a Red List?

Red lists are a globally recognised way of listing and identifying the threat of extinction to species. Species are being assessed objectively based on ongoing scientific information and ongoing research.

The world’s most comprehensive list is the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) list of threatened species. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. There are other more localised red lists, such as the Great British Red List. 

What’s On this July 2023?

Discover some of the threatened species that we are working on and plan to protect and restore.

You can also learn about who are we are doing this with, as all the best effort in this world are done in collaboration and in partnership.

Image displayed are Plantlife plant survey at Munsary Peatlands Nature Reserve a part of Caithness & Sutherland Peatlands IPA Important Plant Area.

What happens when you don’t cut your lawn in May?

With 1 in 5 British wildflowers under threat it is more important than ever to change the way we mow our lawns.

These wildflower stuffed lawns show that in over just a month, your grassy spaces can be a lifeline for wildlife. This gallery shows that people, wild plants, and pollinators alike can live side by side in a thriving green space.

Shorter flowering lawns are a haven for daisies and dandelions, whereas longer patches allow taller plants like Oxeye Daisies and Musk Mallow to bloom.

The nation went blooming wild for plants

No Mow May doesn’t stop at your garden fence. Whole towns and cities bloomed with wildflower as councils and communities let their green spaces grow.

Schools embraced the magic of wild plants with beautiful signs and window displays, sewing the seed for future No Mow May’s that are bigger and wilder than ever before.

New things are always exciting, right? The first time something in your garden flowers, a new patch of Bee Orchids in an unmown lawn, a new record of something rare on your NPMS patch? How about a whole new plant species for your country?

That’s exactly what happened to me in the summer of 2021 – but first, some background.

Discovering Welsh clubmosses

Clubmosses are a group of plants that really excite me. They are a group of plants that have been around in one form or another since the Silurian period (that’s over 430 million years ago). We have five species here in Eryri: Alpine, Marsh, Fir, Lesser and Stag’s Horn. We had another, Interrupted Clubmoss Lycopodium annotinum, until the late 1830’s when William Wilson last saw it above Llyn Y Cwn (The lake of the Dogs) high above Cwm Idwal. By 1894 J.E. Griffith had declared Interrupted Clubmoss extinct in Wales in his ‘Flora of Anglesey and Carnarvonshire’. I have hunted for Interrupted Clubmoss now for years to no avail – I won’t give up.

A good day out in the mountains for me is a ‘four clubmoss day’. A ‘five clubmoss day’ will take me past just a couple of very specific points where I would see Marsh Clubmoss Lycopodiella inundata as well, and would force me on to a longer and circuitous route to get to the places to see the other four.

Discovering the Hares Foot Clubmoss

And so it was that one day in 2021 whilst walking a path that I rarely use, I spotted a clubmoss that really stood out to me. This clubmoss bore a resemblance to Stags Horn Clubmoss, but its growth habit was remarkably upright and the majority of its cones being solitary at the end of its stems (peduncles) rather than in twos or threes on the end of short stems (pedicels) at the apex of the peduncles. In the back of my mind, I remembered another species of clubmoss that had quite recently been confirmed as being present in the UK. So, using the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s Code of Conduct I collected a small sample and took lots and lots of photographs.

On returning home that day I contacted a friend, David Hill, to see what he thought of the find – we were both a little confused and unhappy to declare what we thought it may be. You see, Hares Foot Clubmoss Lycopodium lagopus hadn’t been found further south than Scotland in the UK, and was considered rare there. The confusion for us was that L. lagopus and L. clavatum are very closely related and share a lot of characteristics.

A new species for Wales

Seeing our Welsh Clubmosses is exciting, finding a brand spanking new one is REALLY exciting. I had bottled up my excitement at finding this ‘something new’ for an awfully long time. The specimens had sat on my desk for nearly two years before Dr Rumsey had managed to see them. So, I am really pleased to tell you about it now.

We have six species of Clubmoss in Wales again, but not with the one we thought we may rediscover. To see them all in one walk would be a very long walk indeed so a ‘four clubmoss day’ will remain a good day in the mountains, a ‘five clubmoss day’ is still exceptional and a ‘six clubmoss day’, I am afraid, is just exhausting. One day I may be able to have a ‘seven clubmoss day’- that Interrupted Clubmoss may yet still survive somewhere in the mountains of Eryri.

At Plantlife, there is a buzz of activity brewing as the 1st of May approaches. No Mow May is our biggest campaign – calling on all parts of society to join in a national movement to create thriving green spaces. 

We focus the campaign on May because it’s in May that the flowering season really gets going. Leaving areas of grass unmown in May lets the flowers multiply, better supporting wildlife over the summer. We might be the ones driving No Mow May today, but the seasonal relevance of May 1st has roots much deeper than any modern campaign can claim. 

The Significance of the Seasons 

Our ancestors were deeply connected to nature’s phases. So much so that important dates in the seasonal calendar were considered sacred and even magic. Many of the festivities and traditions of Calan Mai are based in spirituality and botanical folklore. 

On Ysprydnos (May eve, one of the Welsh ‘spirit nights’, when the veil between this world and the next is said to be thinner) locals would collect branches and flowers to decorate their homes, celebrating and welcoming growth and fertility. Fires would be burned to ward off harmful spirits, and young men would place bunches of rosemary tied with white ribbon on the windowsills of those they admired. 

The festival also marks a special point in the agricultural calendar. This is the time that Welsh farmers would turn their herds out to pasture. These kinds of customs remind us that, until fairly recently, a knowledge of how plants, animals, and landscapes change with the seasons was deeply engrained in cultural norms.  

I’m lucky enough to have worked in our temperate rainforests for well over a decade now, and although much of our recent work here at Plantlife has had a focus on rainforest areas of England, through our LOST project in the Lake District and the Building Resilience project in South-West England, both funded by  the National Lottery Heritage Fund, I’ve had the opportunity to get out into some of our Welsh rainforest in past weeks and been reminded just how special they are.

Success is far from guaranteed, and the majority of these transplants had succumbed to slug browsing. There were some notable successes though, with this ‘lob scrob’ Lobarina scrobiculata thriving on a Sycamore, all the better as this is one of the rarer lungwort lichens in Wales. The area where this was transplanted has spectacular communities of lichens on old Ash, Oak and Sycamore trees, probably the best display of lungwort lichens in Wales with abundant Tree Lungwort Lobaria pulmonaria, Parchment Lichen Ricasolia amplissima, ‘Stinky Stictas’ Sticta fuliginosa and Sticta sylvatica and Blue Jelly-skin Leptogium cyanescens.

This has also reminded me just how diverse our rainforest is, in the same that way that no two wetlands, estuaries or mountains are the same, no bit of temperate rainforest is the same. They all differ according to geology, topography, aspect, climate, history, management etc; our temperate rainforest in South-West England is quite different to that in Western Scotland, with Wales somewhere in between. They are especially influenced by ‘oceanicity’ – the degree to which proximity to the Atlantic influences climate – and broadly speaking they are drier and sunnier to the south and much wetter to the north.

This basically means that you’ll never see the same things twice and there’s a lifetime of exploration to be had. I’d urge anyone to grab a hand lens (by no means essential, but definitely helps appreciate the small things) and head out to explore.

Some of my favourite rainforests to visit in Wales are:

• The National Trust’s Hafod y Llan and the woodlands of Nant Gwynant, nestling below Snowdon
• The Woodland Trust’s Coed Felinrhyd and Llennyrch in Dyffryn Ffestiniog
• The National Trust’s Dolmelynllyn at Ganllwyd, north of Dolgellau
• RSPB’s Coed Garth Gell, on the Mawddach west of Dolgellau
• North Wales Wildlife Trust’s Coed Crafnant in Dyffryn Artro
• Natural Resources Wales’ Coed Cwm Cletwr, south of Machynlleth

Ash trees suffering from dieback

One of the biggest issues facing our nature reserves is the ongoing management of Ash trees suffering from dieback – Augill is no different as the woodland there is about 10% Ash. Some of the ash trees were identified through our tree safety surveys as being diseased and close to footpaths and the car park.

Two of the diseased trees were overhanging the Augill Smelt Mill. Any limb shedding would cause further damage to this structure, which is on the Historic England Scheduled Monument At-Risk register.

We made the decision to employ a local firm of tree surgeons to remove both these trees and several other ash trees around the car park. This work was delivered working with our tenant for the reserve; Cumbria Wildlife Trust.

The grassland at Augill Pasture is managed by grazing and unusually for our reserves it is grazed by ponies. Two small ponies were put on the reserve in October and were taken off recently, as the weather became very cold at the beginning of January. This grazing will have controlled the growth of the grass species, allowing the forb species enough space to grow as the weather turns warmer.”