Come with us on a journey to a different world. Go and lie on your belly somewhere in long grass. Take your magnifying glass and look through its little window into a world of small things. Look carefully at the seedhead of a cock’s foot grass, at the petals of bird’s foot trefoil or lady’s smock, and wonder at their structure. Wonder at the creatures sitting or landing on the plants too, maybe a blue butterfly or a soldier beetle.
If you’re not sure what a lady’s smock or a soldier beetle is, don’t worry! Enjoy and wonder at whatever you see. You get a better chance of meeting a variety of characters in long grass – unfortunately, a lot of grasslands have lost their happy colours and their smell of summer, and many of our lawns and parks, road verges and pastures are uniformly green.
Now imagine a rural scene, anywhere. Very likely that your mind’s eye sees some sort of grassland; meadow or pasture, gardens, a village green; people at work or playing, hanging around or having a picnic. Grasslands have been an essential part of our social and economic landscape for centuries, and meadows a part of everyday life. Hay was cut in late summer – an event for the whole village sometimes – after having grown throughout spring. In the autumn, hay meadows would be grazed until around Easter, and in winter the nutritious hay was fed to the animals.
Hay meadows breathe a special atmosphere: flowers, insects, grasses and fungi. The plants provide food for bees, hoverflies, butterflies, spiders and grasshoppers. And they then give food for birds and other animals.
But over the last century an astounding change has happened, and we have lost the variety of life in many places. We now have only 2% of the hay meadows that were in Britain in the 1930s. They made way for housing developments, tree plantations, “improved” grazing land (types of grass containing more sugar to fatten the animals faster) and lawns. Many of us feel that public green spaces look their prettiest when monogreen and cut short.
On these green fields wildlife is deprived of food. With fewer species-rich grasslands in the country and poorer connections between them, creatures find it harder to move around – like us, animals are reluctant to travel where there is no good food and accommodation available!
But there are things we can do. If you enjoyed looking into an unknown world, take part in the ‘No-mow May’ campaign to give wildlife a chance, food and shelter. Leave your lawn to grow throughout May or over the summer, and you will see the number of plant species increase. Have a look at blodaugwyllt.cymru to discover our native flowers, and you will find information about meadows on www.magnificentmeadows.org.uk. The Heritage-Lottery funded Gwreiddiau Gwyllt project is collecting Welsh-language nature resources to create a database which will be available to the public online at the end of the project.
Do you know our species by their Welsh name?
cocksfoot – troed y ceiliog
bird’s foot trefoil – pysen y ceirw
lady’s smock, cuckoo flower – blodyn llefrith
blue butterfly – glesyn
soldier beetle – chwilen soldiwr
meadow – gweirglodd
insect – trychfil
spider – pry cop
grass hopper – sboncyn gwair