Where have all the flowers gone?

gone for hayThe village green was a waving sea of grass last week and then poof! It’s all gone. The Meadow Brown butterflies could be seen flopping disconsolately around in the shortened grass, their habitat somewhat curtailed. Grasshoppers have just started to emerge and zizz, now under somewhat reduced circumstances.

There’s something gorgeously glossy about a meadow at it’s peak, flowering grasses moving sinuously in the breeze. And I do understand that it needs to be cut otherwise it will just become a tussocky sodden mess. Most of the Green has been cut for haylage which is better than merely mowing it which I don’t think is particularly beneficial. I hope that they keep to this sort of regime rather than trying to enforce a prim and proper boring all the time sort of village green.

Marston’s clay land isn’t as floristically diverse as neighbouring Salisbury Plain chalk downland  but nonetheless is home to bugs, butterflies and other scuttlers which in turn provide food for swallows, bats and the local owls. A lot of the grassland around here has been “improved” so the Green offers a more diverse area of grass and flowers. The margin in the picture above contains amongst other things, Geranium pratense, Meadowsweet and Meadow Vetchling.

My parents have just returned from SW France and were bowled over by the flowers in bloom both wild and in gardens. They went particularly WOW! on seeing the roadsides on the way to Minerve awash with wildflowers which they decided to revisit a couple of days later, only to find that the margins had been mown in the interim – no more flowers!

The diversity of butterflies is increasing as summer rolls on, Large Skippers are abroad in the garden and feasting on Meadow Vetchling in field and by way margins and I’ve seen a few Scarlet Tiger moths. A Marbled White butterfly passed through the garden to somewhere more interesting.

Fourteen gardeners and more allotmenteers were brave enough to open their gardens / allotments to public scrutiny in Marston and Worton on Sunday. Thank you! We visited most, and all were clearly loved and tended, nearly everyone had a veg plot of some description tucked somewhere, I was most envious of new potatoes, ripening strawberries and plumptious currants.

And we had rain hurrah! Although it was a bit odd to be confined indoors in the gloom after weeks of sun.