‘Through the Wytham Flats; Red Loosestrife and blond Meadowsweet among, …we tracked the shy Thames Shore.’
Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis.
Annual Biodiversity Lecture at Oxford University's Botanic Garden: The Special Flowers of Oxford Meadows
given by Judy Webb, Friday, 22 May 2015.
A celebration of the ancient floodplain haymeadow flora of our beautiful local meadows, now of national and international importance, as 97% of such flower-rich meadows have been lost since the 1930s.
Dependent on intermittent winter flooding, this flora also needs the historic management of a hay harvest (in the past by scythe) and aftermath grazing. Church, in 1922, describes such management:
‘..a 6ft man cutting a 6ft swathe. A good man is recorded, in living memory, as working from 4am to 9pm, consuming in the time a quartern loaf of bread and a gallon of beer, with possibly a dozen pipes of tobacco’.
The key species of these meadows is the maroon-flowered Great Burnet but, in addition, the botanical fascination of these areas is that this very long history of the same management has selected, for rare early-flowering, ecotypes of plants such as the Devil’s-bit Scabious and the rayed form of the Black Knapweed, Centaurea nigra
Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis.
Annual Biodiversity Lecture at Oxford University's Botanic Garden: The Special Flowers of Oxford Meadows
given by Judy Webb, Friday, 22 May 2015.
A celebration of the ancient floodplain haymeadow flora of our beautiful local meadows, now of national and international importance, as 97% of such flower-rich meadows have been lost since the 1930s.
Dependent on intermittent winter flooding, this flora also needs the historic management of a hay harvest (in the past by scythe) and aftermath grazing. Church, in 1922, describes such management:
‘..a 6ft man cutting a 6ft swathe. A good man is recorded, in living memory, as working from 4am to 9pm, consuming in the time a quartern loaf of bread and a gallon of beer, with possibly a dozen pipes of tobacco’.
The key species of these meadows is the maroon-flowered Great Burnet but, in addition, the botanical fascination of these areas is that this very long history of the same management has selected, for rare early-flowering, ecotypes of plants such as the Devil’s-bit Scabious and the rayed form of the Black Knapweed, Centaurea nigra