Meadows

While the inclusion of meadows in gardens is relatively recent, as an aspect of farming practice, they go back thousands of years, in Europe at least. In North Amreica there is a meadow (as opposed to natural grassland and prairie) heritage, but it is even more recent. The richness of ancient meadows is due to the unaltered cutting, grazing or burning regimes imposed on them, continuity in management being important if species are to establish and thrive.

So what is a meadow and how does it differ from pasture and natural grassland? Strictly speaking, a meadow is an open tract of land where grass is grown to supply winter feed. The hay is harvested late in summer, allowing many of the plants to seed, and then the plot is grazed in autumn and winter. The feet of grazing animals disturb the soil, making ruts and bare patches that provide seeding opportunities without competition from mature neighbours. Pasture is grassland kept short by grazing animals for much of the year, thus giving flowering plants a less competitive environment in which to thrive. Natural grassland is controlled by the terrain (too high, too rocky and so on), acts of God — fire or flood, extreme drought, even strong salt winds — or wild animals, such as deer or rabbits.

The plants in pasture and meadow can be very different. Meadowsweet, ox-eye daisies and salad burnet are examples of plants with long stems that cannot withstand summer grazing and are found in meadows. White clover cannot compete for too long in long grass and so is indicative of pasture, which has a greater incidence of plants with leaves in the form of rosettes, such as dandelions and daisies, as well as aggressive thistles and ragwort (Senecio jacobaea).

Nature, rather than man, played the largest part in the early stages, the natural climax vegetation in temperate latitudes being woodland. In Britain, for example, when the last Ice Age ended in around 12,000 BC, most of the country was glaciated, but south, roughly, of a line you could draw from the Thames basin to the Bristol Channel it remained unglaciated. Even so, trees could not get a foothold and a sub-arctic tundra grassland flora dominated. From 12,000 to 8000 BC, climate change enabled a predominantly woodland flora to become established, with pockets of grassland flora that were to be valuable reserves when changes in climate and circumstances allowed them to spread to other parts of the land. At this period the sea was much lower than now, so that Britain was still attached to the Continent, with the Thames most likely flowing into the Rhine. Between 7000 and 5000 BC, the climate warmed up to be even warmer than today. But wae had a hunting, not a pastoral, population, so with little pressure on the land the vegetation cover remained largely unaffected by man. From 5000 to 3000 BC, the climate continued to be warm, though much wetter. The land was sinking, the North Sea formed and Britain was finally severed from the Continent. Once Neolithic man started practising agriculture, forest clearance began to make way for grazing flocks and herds. Chalk downland and limestone escarpments like the Mendips became the earliest grazing areas, because the thin soil enabled easy tree clearance. Regions with highly nutritious grazing, such as Romney Marsh, had never been covered by trees anyway, being insufficiently drained. As the numbers of grazing animals increased, so did the need for grassland. Agricultural pressures soon started changing the face of the countryside. Similar changes were happening throughout the northern temperate world.

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