Sowing and mowing

by Greg Smith, Head Gardener, Burgess Park 23/11/24

Links below to further sections of the blog:

Maintaining meadows
Making meadows
Moving meadows
Scraping meadows
Waiting meadows
Mowing and growing
Nitrogen fixing legumes
Nutrient attracting soil
Climate in central London
Current flora
Meadow mania
Turf wars
An evolved system of maintenance

Across our parks and recreational green spaces, 
in seed or roots in the soil,
carried in by the wind or water,
by wild animals or us by accident, 
or already growing amongst
the plants we strive to cultivate,
are the wild flora!

Here are the wild plants and other green organisms that sustain our wildlife, what remains of it, what it is evolving into, networks of fungi and bacteria and all kinds of microscopic life in the soil, water and air, all around and within us.

 We see ourselves as separate from the wildness, but truthfully we are part of nature; we just influence the natural world to the point where we describe our civilisation as artificial, and the remaining wildness as natural. In fact, we are part of a natural system that must remain in balance to persist, and we evolve in symbiosis with all the other life. All organisms are connected, in the sense that the behaviour of each individual organism affects everything else, like infinite ripples across water.

 We can consider ourselves as individual entities, or, instead, as though we have individual sentience. Our brains are also a sensory apparatus connected to a far more profound and communal intelligence that connects all life, like a swarm of bees with a greater intelligence than its individual parts. 

We could see all the negative characteristics of our communal personality: fear, hate, ignorance and destruction of the planet as a disease that needs to be removed as quickly as possible. Of course, the positive characteristics of our communal nature involve the opposite, evolving in the most calm, balanced and diverse way possible whilst protecting the rest of nature as much as we can.

With our position at the top of the evolutionary tree, it is is difficult to define what is ‘natural’ in a park in terms of everything else not being influenced artificially in some way, due to our human presence. Everything in the world is influenced by us, even the few places that humans have never set foot on.

See more information about Doggerland: National Geographic Doggerland resources.

The last ice age finished 12,000 years ago, and then over the next six thousand years the modern wild flora of the UK became established as the low-lying land connecting our islands to mainland Europe flooded. Much of the land would have been mixed woodland, with birch, pine, hazel, aspen, and elm, and would have probably have been dominated by oak.

Animals such as wild deer and oxen would have been plentiful then, with their grazing and movement creating a tapestry of woodland and more open grassy areas. So perhaps we could say that the first meadows in the UK were maintained by wild herds of animals foraging for food! 

The excellent articles below describe the lowering percentage of woodland and increased amount of meadows over time as agriculture evolved in the UK:
Royal Forestry Society’s History of British Woodlands
English Heritage’s History of Meadows

Most of the woodland was removed. This was mostly replaced by semi-wild meadows, to keep animals, make hay, and increasingly grow cereal and other crops. Now, most of the meadows have been replaced by far more intensive crop and livestock production. Less than five per cent of our woodlands and only a few percent of our hay meadows remain. 

There are few truly wild meadows in the UK that sustain themselves without human maintenance. These are marshy wetland areas, coastal salt marshes, or in exposed and inaccessible places on steep hill side or valleys, or on mountainsides, where there is only a thin layer of soil above the underlying rock.

Without large amounts of wild grazing animals, meadows are kept by human management. The wildflower meadows of the UK evolved in symbiosis with the humans and the livestock sustaining them. Also, there is also now huge pressure on farmland to be productive enough to grow sufficient crops, but this has led to an industrial type of farming which is very environmentally destructive, with huge fields of single crops, massive chemical use and a rapid degradation of the soil, leading to increasing fertiliser dependency.

But now, more sustainable approaches are being developed to make these modern crop and livestock growing systems more useful for wildlife. These involve crop rotation, keeping the soil planted with living roots constantly in the soil, reconnecting crop and animal farming, using green manures, less watering, fewer chemicals – or none, renovating old-fashioned meadows or having boundaries between crops for wildflowers. 

Burgess Park is a recently re-built space which is still being developed, and which, even before the recent renovations, grew in stages out of industrial land and dense housing. 

Before this, it must have been open, marshy, arable land. 

We can imagine the area over which the park now lies as once being a marshy mosaic of farmed land. First, the marsh land would have been drained, for agriculture and then buildings.

Perhaps wild-growing plants could have even survived from before the various stages of development, or before the park or even London existed – in seeds or plant material already in the soil!

From long before even this time, seeds and plant remains have been found in the ancient London clay, deposited thirty to fifty million years ago. Plant and seed remains have been found in this ancient mud which are much closer genetically to tropical plants from far away than the flora we recognise today.

We could define the truly wild plants as those that sustain themselves in our landscape and create offspring without human soil cultivation and weeding. But nearly all vegetation is organised artificially and managed in some way,  however minimally – not just in our park but in all accessible green space in the UK. For example, the cornfield annuals so popular in mixed wild flower packets evolved in sync with the cereal crops and cultivated soil they grew in.

Perhaps then the truly wild plants are simply those that exist in the park that we haven’t planted or sown intentionally. This is still confusing, because even much of what we describe as ‘native’ species have been sown from seed collected far away from London, or grown elsewhere. We reintroduce these plants. They are most suitable for our wildlife, and hopefully they will still be suitable for our inner-city climate. 

Are the offspring of these reintroduced plants now native plants again? What then about non-native species which we introduce from elsewhere in the world, and which happily naturalise and have offspring, or spread by their roots to grow alongside our native plants? How long do these immigrants have to wait before being accepted as citizens of the UK? 

Reveal any soil in the park, leave it bare, remove any plants, and perhaps cultivate the soil: a miracle occurs, despite the removal of all the visible life on the surface. First a few seedlings, and soon thick meadows; eventually shrubs and trees, from plant material in the soil or raining down from elsewhere in great quantities. Nature has a capacity to survive and regenerate, way beyond our own.

In 1857, a chap called Charles cleared a small area of meadow of plants and roots, then observed what life re-emerged. He counted the emerging seedlings and recorded which survived over time, which were eaten or died of drought. 

From this and all kinds of other experiments he came up with all kinds of theories about evolution.

The Albany Road meadow was like a huge and much less precise version of this experiment – though we also added lots of fresh seed to the seed bank already present, to see which plants would eventually succeed. We then left many other areas uncut for longer periods or experimented with cutting times and amount of raking, to see what range of plants would grow with the turf layer still present. 

A recreation of Darwin’s seed garden experiment can be seen at his home, Down House. Read information about Darwin’s living laboratory and about conserving English meadows.

Maintaining meadows

As described above, there are few truly wild meadows found in places where humans aren’t cultivating the soil. For whatever reason, the shrubs and trees in these places don’t take over and herbaceous vegetation predominates.

With human-made meadows the general idea is of course to cut or graze a meadow at an appropriate frequency and time of year. Otherwise – unless conditions are specific enough for the meadow to persist naturally without cutting – it will perhaps soon turn from a meadow to shrubbery, and eventually to woodland.

Cutting involves removing as much material as possible, to lower nutrients, which ideally means a higher ratio of flowers and finer grasses can predominate, with a lower ratio of thicker grass and larger, more invasive herbaceous plants.

It would be nice to have other complementary colours of wild flowers to contrast with the blue, and to have more flowers throughout the day, as well as more diversity for a wider variety of pollinators – but these banks look fab compared with many of our other meadows. 

The cuttings are left temporarily for the seed to return to the soil. But then they need to be removed by raking or collecting in some way. This is easier after they’ve dried out.

Ideally the ‘thatch’ layer is removed, creating space between the grasses for other plants to grow, revealing bare soil that flower seeds, moisture and light can more easily reach, and preventing the thatch from composting down into the soil and increasing nutrients. Otherwise, a thick mat of dead material builds up that the grasses grow back through, creating thick tussocks. (But this is paradise for ants, grasshoppers, mice, even nesting wrens or larger birds looking for nesting material or mice).

Left: Raking one of our west banks with HandsOn London. Below right: volunteers this spring, and the amount of ‘hay’ removed.

This is a relatively small bank compared with most of our meadow, but it still took two days to remove bramble and another day to strim. Then, twenty volunteers plus myself and fantastic HandsOn volunteer coordinator, Jon Meech, raked the cuttings after they had dried. It took another day to load all of this onto a van and remove for compost. This is one of the smaller banks! 

The cuttings would then become hay or straw, but at the park we can compost cuttings to use as a rough mulch around trees in wilder areas, or to rot down as compost if it is turned enough to heat up and kill unwanted plant fragments and seeds. 

Traditional wheat/cereal meadows were re-cultivated/sown yearly for new crops, so they had a range of cornfield annuals which are popular and available today, often now mixed with short-lived, quick-flowering, non native-species and cultivars in different colour combos to extend the flowering seasons. The cornfield annuals grow fast, to flower before the crops are harvested and soil re-cultivated, and actually prefer a richer more arable soil.

Many people love these colourful mixed packs but are very disappointed when they only last a year or two! You have to re-cultivate and re-sow these seeds or add longer lasting wildflowers and grasses for when the annuals are done!

Natural meadows often contain parasitic plants. The only one available for purchase in large quantities in the UK is Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor). Below are pages about rattle by Steve Head and plant life and another about parasitic plants by Amanda Tuke.
https://www.wlgf.org/rhinanthus.html
https://www.countryfile.com/wildlife/parasitical-plants-of-the-british-meadows
https://www.plantlife.org.uk/plants-and-fungi/yellow-rattle/

Yellow Rattle attaches its roots to those of the surrounding grasses to steal nutrients. The grass grows less thickly, and more flowers can thrive. 

We should do experiments on scale sowing this plant. Perhaps central London conditions aren’t right, and it is hard to establish the seeds. They need to be fresh, as they lose their viability quickly but also need a period of cold before germination.

But there is Yellow Rattle reported by the Friends, not that far away, at the lovely Mitchum Common, or huge fields I’ve seen somewhere in North Kent.

There is another type of meadow possible in fields cultivated agriculturally: the green manures, some of which are legumes. These are sown and then often cut and dug in when they are still green, before going to seed. These are often used to protect the soil from undesirable plants and erosion between crops, to regenerate the soil structure and nutrients and create colourful and floriferous temporary meadows for pollinators. Plants sown can include Lucerne (alfafa), crimson or other clovers, vetches, phacelia or grasses such as rye. Lucerne especially is a good choice for our site, since it is the food plant of the Holly Blue butterfly. Chicory is also used as a green manure. 

https://www.soilassociation.org/farmers-growers/low-input-farming-advice/cover-crops-and-green-manures/

Permanent meadows, for pasture or wildlife, can have some annuals, but are mainly biennial or perennial wildflowers and between fifty and ninety per cent grasses. Flowers in permanent meadows generally prefer a lower nutrient soil so the grass is thinner and more flowers can grow. Yellow rattle can be also added at a suitable point. 

Many of the typical native wildflowers available from the various suppliers aren’t so suitable for our compacted sandy/silty clay soil, unless we keep re-cultivating and topping up the soil with fresh seed. Perhaps we should be using other plants that can better compete in a richer, heavier soil, or cut and rake the grass more systematically in ways that allow a suitable range of flowers to better thrive.

Of course, removing cuttings and nutrients is very valid for all our meadows and prairies in the park. On soil with a high clay content, we do want to cut and remove as much material regularly and in effective ways on such a scale, if we want thinner grass and potentially more flowers. But it’s important to do this at the right times to allow whatever flowers are present to successfully seed.

Making meadows

1. Moving meadows

We can dig out the soil and replace it with a far lower nutrient material. This is the best way to truly create a highly floriferous permanent meadow that hopes to establish a more diverse range of species than those found growing locally, creating a blank canvas and starting again – but this involves large cost, a lot of energy and resources and environmental damage, and even then – unless the soil is very different, or the sown plants are truly suitable to local conditions – a range of locally present wild plants will return. The floriferous and diverse west side meadow uses a low nutrient sand quarried quite locally to London. 

Low nutrient meadows can also be built with all kinds of recycled materials. A brief blog by John Little of the Grass Roof Company describes the potential of crushed building materials. Ironically there have been, and will continue to be, giant piles of crushed buildings all around the park, as development happens to the surrounding area! Perhaps the old estates could become new meadows in the park! 

2. Scraping meadows

Instead of importing a mountain of new sandy soil or other low nutrient planting medium, we can scrape away the topsoil and as much plant /seed material as possible before cultivating the subsoil below, but it tends to be heavier clay than at the surface; quite variable in quality and incredibly compacting in places. 

This removes the soil with the most nutrients and a lot of the seed bank in the soil. Success depends on how much of the remaining invasive plant material can be removed/killed and the characteristics of the subsoil below. But ultimately the soil is still very similar to that on the surface in attracting nutrients. 

 It’s a beautiful space for a meadow but the challenge will be stopping the nearby bramble/creeping thistle from returning after it was pretty thoroughly prepared by a team with mattocks, after digging out bramble roots with Complete Ecology’s lovely old tractor.

3. Waiting meadows

But finally, there is a third option, to do as little work as possible and leave the soil as it is! We can just not cut the grass, see what plants emerge and then best maintain our new meadow, with little soil or micro-organism disturbance at all. Or we can cultivate the soil, grass and topsoil included, perhaps starting with an over sowing of yellow rattle and other wild flower seeds in Autumn; then experiment with suitable plants by seed or division, trying to control the balance of plants with different timings of cutting and raking. This is what we have been doing all over the park, and actually the results are interesting and sometimes contrary to accepted theory about what will work or not. 

The Ladies Bedstraw is spreading happily to flat areas left uncut near original location on the nearby west banks, near the outdoor gym.

Wild mignonette was used to make a yellow dye called weld. We sowed this on the west side, where it grew for a few seasons and then vanished, but a few seeds seem to have reached these little mounds, where it is happier to grow. Every year we cut the grass around this little plant whilst it flowers, hoping it will spread into a larger clump! 

Rust Square. There were small areas of meadow turf laid in the redesign of Rust Square, but only a few patches established. This type of meadow turf often seems to be grown through some kind of plastic net which falls apart. Then it is a question of whether the plants growing through it can attach themselves to the ground, as the net they are growing through constantly gets ripped by cutting, and disintegrates. 

We tried to cut the whole wooded section into sections of longer grass. These areas are actually full of dog violets, red campion spread from other seeding elsewhere, white and red dead nettles, cow parsley, cranesbills and other attractive plants. Then the area dries out and becomes a huge thicket of less attractive hedge mustard (Sisymbrium officinale), and really needs cutting and collecting during Summer.

Mowing and growing

Nitrogen fixing legumes

Legume lawns. Great mounds of Spotted Medick (Medicago arabica) appear in the poorer areas of uncut lawn, like a lush vegetated hilly landscape at insect scale.

The pea/bean family (Fabaceae) is a huge family that contains seven per cent of flowering plants. The peas/beans have evolved in symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria called Rhizobia, which infect the plant roots, creating nodules containing the bacteria. The bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen into a soluble form the plant can use.

Plants can also have similar relationships with beneficial networks of fungus called Mycorrhiza that also merge with plant root systems to find more moisture and nutrients.

So, counter intuitively in terms of our understanding of lowering nutrients, in places where the soil is compacted heavy clay and relatively bare of grass, the main thing that often appears is a great mat of legumes!

 We have clovers (Trifolium spp), lucerne (Medicago sativa) and vetches (Vicia spp) that do well in milder years. This year the white and red clover appeared in large clumps and flowered until the recent dry weather, but in drier years it is hardly visible at all. 

But the main legume is a lush, clover-like plant with tiny yellow flowers called Spotted Medick (Medicago arabica). This originates in the Mediterranean basin, and has a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria Ensifer medicae. We left banks of the great lawn uncut this year, and this plant was about fifty per cent of what emerged! We can remove the surface layer of soil and seed bank it contains to start again, but these are the plants that naturally want to colonise our compacted clay soil. 

Nutrient attracting soil

Jar tests done this year by apprentice Kiran. This is soil from the low-nutrient sandy meadow compared with a typical park flowerbed, which is a mix of typical rubbly clay soil with some organic matter from yearly mulches. Sieving and cleaning the soil of organic matter, then popping in a jar with water, shaking vigorously and leaving for a while to settle, separates the soil particles into layers of separate mineral particle size to give a rough visual idea of proportions of sand/silt and clay. 

There are various soil texture tests you can also do by rolling small amounts of wet soil between your fingers to check the soil’s texture, whilst following a visual diagram that works out what soil texture you have. 

When considering nutrient levels in our meadows, note the characteristics of our actual soil, which is a mix of original or imported top soil/organic matter and human debris, but it lies above a deep fold of London clay with various ratios of sand/silt and gravel, 130 metres deep in places. In the park we likely have alluvium and head clay/silt – the former deposited from the river, the latter developing in the tidal flood plains, which themselves have changed over time as the Thames changed its course and London grew.

https://earthwise.bgs.ac.uk/index.php/London_Atlas:_Geology
https://www.lnhs.org.uk/index.php/articles-british/249-geology-of-london

Clay naturally attracts nutrients because of its negative electrical charge, whereas larger soil particles hold onto fewer nutrients, so our soil is naturally quite nutrient rich, especially when a layer of imported loam has been added and organic matter builds up in the topsoil over time, with cuttings and organic matter breaking down. But our soil varies in proportions of clay mixed with courser silt/sand/gravel particles and of course layers of rubble from the city’s past. Our urban soil has been walked and driven over and been moved around all over the park, compacting it further and damaging the soil structure and micro-organisms more times than it can remember. Of course it’s still not a highly modified flowerbed or allotment soil where we specifically mulch with vast amounts of organic matter to grow the widest range of ornamental plants or food, but in terms of grass thickness and species type it is still quite nutrient rich.

Climate in central London

This can be several degrees warmer than outside the city as the fumes of the city create their own greenhouse effect. We have to be aware that in long droughts and hot summers many UK wildflowers frazzle away. But hopefully, as long as enough complete their life cycles or survive the heat, wildflowers will return the following year or even rejuvenate and flower again in Autumn. Most typical native meadow flowers grow and flower more between Spring and early Summer. But as the temp drops again there can be another flush of flowers in late Summer, or right through the year in cooler years such as this one. 

But if these high, dry temps become the norm we will have to choose more drought and heat tolerant plants, or landscape our park better to create sunken, more moist planted areas. The Camberwell Swales demonstrate this very well, with a moisture gradient and nice mix of original Hitchmough plants and wildness, though they are perhaps too deep. We let them continue growing rather than neatly control all year. This makes them look a bit messy to some eyes, but we are just experimenting with letting attractive and less invasive wild plants fill the gaps left by the original planting, to see what works. This is also a less intensive and far more wildlife-friendly approach to ‘weeding’.

Current flora

                                             

The current meadow plant populations really vary across the park. From the centre to east of the park there are a large amounts of older, very established wild meadows and banks, generally with thick grass and very established seed banks and plants that can compete with the thick grass in the heavy rubble-filled compacted soil. So the wild plants tend to be the more invasive and larger species, many of which are very common locally, and have likely been here a long time: hemlock, tall patches of nettles and thistles, cow parsley in shadier areas, hogweed, mallow, dock, mugwort.

These are all perfectly desirable for wildlife, and are a great habitat, but are not so much enjoyed by humans. They are more like a two-metre high, stingy /spiky thicket than a low meadow full of flowers to be run through. But for ants or seed collecting birds, it is paradise. 

Lower, prettier flowers do poke through our thicker meadows in Spring and even Summer in milder years: legumes, cranesbill, yarrow, Ladies Bedstraw and many other species, and – later – chicory, wild carrot, vetches, teasel and ragwort, various other yellow daisies, and some smaller plants flowering again as the weather cools after Summer.

The biggest problems are with bramble and Russian vine (Fallopia baldschuanicum) spreading into the meadows from near the ‘antiques’ yard, and with greater and field bindweed, creeping thistle and cleavers (Galium aparine), all of which can cover meadows in huge and ever- spreading patches which are pretty impossible to weed out. They all have wildlife and habitat value, but these vigorous bullies crowd out everything else and make sustaining diverse plant populations pretty impossible. Unfortunately they really need treating one way or another before they grow out of control. Even the smaller bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) can create dull, flat areas twenty metres across in a few years, with all the other plants trapped underneath a great twining mat of foliage – the only relief being when it vanishes in cold weather, only to return over twice the area the following Spring.

I’m pretty sure that the main species of bramble in the park is Armenian/Himalayan bramble rather than some form of native or European species as previously described, though these may be present too. I really think spot treating with relatively small amount of stump killing chemicals, after cutting down and doing our best to dig out, is the most pragmatic way to control it. 

https://www.britishwildlife.com/article/article-volume-34-number-1-page-28-30/

In some areas it is more likely that thinning the grass will just mean more tall invasive species and bramble filling the gaps rather than more delicate little flowers, unless we have machines that can keep cutting and collecting, scarifying and seeding enough to slowly change the ratio of larger and less desirable to smaller and more desirable plants over a long period of time. 

But there must be trillions of seeds and fragments of locally prevalent fauna already in the soil. Most of them are happy in a range of conditions and can still thrive with less nutrients. For example, the giant patches of creeping thistle or field bindweed in the now much lower-nutrient west side meadow are still perfectly content to spread at a worrying rate.

In many ways the lusher areas of current short-cut lawns are potentially much better meadows than the existing well-established ones that are supposed to be meadows! They still have a wide range of smaller, prettier wildflowers and a finer sward of grass, and more chance to control the invasive plants at an early stage.

The lawns on the west side of the park, and some of the canal path areas especially, seem more floriferous. The huge south banks are full of wild carrot and chicory, and all of the wilder meadow areas on the west side are cut and collected carefully.  

Chicory on the south banks. If you want to see the flowers at their best, it has to be early morning, with the low sun shining through the petals. Soon the flowers are quickly pollinated by bees; then they close in the heat of the sun, and look pale and unimpressive. On greyer days the flowers open more gradually, but you don’t get the wall of colour. Then new flowers open the next day, from summer until autumn, when all of the flowers are spent. 

The new meadow sowing, and large amounts of new wildflower seed in various experiments, have also created an increasingly huge seed bank of wildflowers to spread around. What is really positive is how wild flowers move so quickly into new areas once enough are sown. If enough suitable seed is present plants will sustain themselves and spread! 

The vast amount of red campion (Silene dioica) and hedge bedstraw (Galium mollugo) sown just on the north banks and in small patches at Rust Square seem to have spread into various suitable locations on the border between meadows and woodlands, even appearing along paths in the woods themselves. Ladies Bedstraw, sown on the west banks and in seed-sowing experiments, is popping up on margins of thicker grass in flat areas nearby.

Hedge Bedstraw along the north banks. It has done well towards the Walworth Road end, and is a really good ground cover to stop bindweed and – to an extent – even its relative cleavers. Now it is appearing in great clouds along the woodland edges one hundred metres away, on the other side of the mound.

I’m interested in whether all these wildflowers are naturally spreading or whether wildlife lovers are sprinkling seed here and there. Please help nature on its way! 

Meadow mania

Another positive development but hard to control aspect is guerilla gardening in the park. I built the Albany Road experiment to maintain it quite extensively, it is a work in progress, but one I’ve not had the time to develop in the last few years and dream of better kit and budgets to do so more efficiently and to a higher standard. It is still a highly floriferous but in places tall and patchy meadow with invasive plants returning such as big patches of nettles and mallow. Beyond the flat areas, the banks themselves are huge and hard to control.

What is amazing is unknown persons have started to maintain some of these Albany Road areas, weeding, removing the vast ugly carpet of cleavers in spring to better define the flowers. For me this couldn’t be a better outcome, especially if there is a foraging aspect too.

Interestingly, cleavers is edible and actually in the coffee family; roast and grind the seeds for a caffeinated beverage not too dissimilar to instant coffee! Be careful foraging in the park too regularly though as there are potentially all kinds of pollution below ground. 

The Albany Road experiment. It’s still actually very floriferous, with a vast range of species, but difficult to stop the less desirable species from spreading. It looks a bit tatty but I feel a bit miffed when people suggest that it is a failure. I’m just unable to do much to it at the moment apart from cut and remove all the cuttings when the flowers all finish. 

It was really useful to see how this plant community developed over time, but obviously it was never going to remain a colour cornfield annual display without regular topping up of seed, which actually wouldn’t have cost a fortune with a small tractor and cultivator. The main plant above is white campion (Silene latifolia) though it looks similar to bladder campion (vulgaris). This dainty little plant seems happier with more thuggish neighbours than red campion that is still quite widely spread across the North banks and now into woodland or other suitable places in the west side. 

These secret meadow maintainers are now having all the same insurmountable problems I had for years battling the more invasive plants but many thanks for your efforts!

Turf wars

The data gained from all these experiments are the type of plants that thrive in our conditions and how they are affected by cutting. With traditional meadows you may cut at the end of Spring and then later in Summer, or just one cut towards the end of Summer. Cutting later in Summer or even Autumn is more sensitive for wildlife and means a wider range of seed has time to ripen and return to the soil.

Most short lawns apart from the most barren, exposed to heat and wind, compacted, over-used for sport/events areas such as the great lawn or increasingly west side main lawns, become more like alpine meadows in Spring!

 One plant I’m surprised to see is musk storksbill (Erodium moschatum). It is short lived and seems to die after flowering, but perhaps can stay growing as long as it is constantly pruned back. It is supposed to be quite rare in the UK but appears all over the park.

These similar ‘lawn weeds’ still appear profusely in the thicker meadows too, but are soon engulfed by the grass and taller plants. But there are hedge (purple and white), small flowered, dissected and Herb Robert cranesbills, lesser and unrelated greater celadine, veronicas, the various legumes, storksbill, daisies, buttercups and white and red dead nettles. In more woodland areas there are green alkanet, cow parsley and other umbels, comfrey including the white variety. We also have plenty of bulb areas in Spring but it would be nice to have more.

Cutting once a month to maintain this array of low growing lawn flowers with a longer period left in Spring isn’t actually that awful. It keeps the grass low and stops too much biomass building up. These low growing plants can tolerate cutting and perhaps benefit from conditions that allow them to better compete with taller more vigorous species so they spread much more freely than otherwise. 

In areas of short lawn we can easily identify and cut around notable colonies of flowers, not just in spring but throughout the year. 

Then Achillea, chicory, wild carrot, charlock, mallow, perforated St Johns Wort, less and greater salad burnet and a bewildering array of yellow daisies of various species, shapes and sizes, and a range of white umbellifers flower through summer; biennials or perennials that flower profusely and seed that are somehow shaped to find their way through the thick sward of grass to the soil and remain viable to re-sprout, with roots that can penetrate to where there is moisture. In some areas if we cut in Summer, we will cut down all the chicory and wild carrot and potential seeds. Once we let these plants grow thick and tall it’s hard to cut them anyway. 

It would be nice to have more diversity on the chicory banks … all kinds of interesting non-natives could be also tried … for example, cardoons seem perfectly happy or many other taller more vigorous herbaceous plants. This is why we cut the (chicory filled) south banks of the mounds at the end of Winter. Leaving it almost to Spring makes last year’s stems much easier to cut down and removes the maximum amount of biomass from the previous year, after the seed has had plenty of time to fall. 

But if the bank of chicory looks pretty especially early morning on a sunny day and are feeding thousands of bees, then let’s worry more about other areas more threatened by invasive plants.

Perhaps looking at the diverse meadows of central Europe would be a good place to start. If we can’t create enough diversity from the limited range of native plants still suitable for our conditions then we can still choose ones from further away that benefit wildlife and look attractive to us. 

An evolved system of maintenance

James Hitchmough kindly handed me a brief management plan once. It begins with a thoughtful statement.

Many planting schemes in public landscapes fail, or at least never achieve expectations because maintenance thought and practice is unable to respond to the needs of the developing vegetation. Very often this is because maintenance is often seen as a process of making inputs as specified rather than achieving the desired outcome. To break out of this situation it is essential that maintenance staff are able to make connections between what they do and how the vegetation responds accordingly. Maintenance needs to be a ‘conversation’ between what is being maintained and the maintainers, not a set of instructions

I really treasure my copy of James’s management plan but it amuses me that the above words gently pass on the responsibility for potential success to the maintainers for such a large and complex planting! But I’ve tried to follow this approach, but not just with Hitchmough’s prairie plants but all of the plants, wildlife and people in the park. 

My ability to do this beyond my own personal capacity is simply down to the people power and resources I have at my disposal. 

But there are so many ways that we can evolve a sustainable and more wildlife friendly practice that creates a more diverse landscape of plants, not just for ourselves but all the other life we share this planet with.

This interesting flower is a holoparasitic plant that doesn’t photosynthesise. Instead it gains nutrients with its roots connecting to other host plants, including grasses, legumes and daisies. We found a huge clump at Addington Square in amongst the rough grass and green alkanet.

The traditional park and public green space approach to managing grassland and the intermingled shrubs and trees is incredibly out of date and is slowly being evolved in many green spaces to become more sustainable and wildlife sensitive but it needs to be clearly understood and written down at Burgess.

Currently teams of knackered staff try to keep all the short grass cut at the same frequency to create a monoculture of lawn, a non-flowering mat of nothing remotely useful beyond protecting and slowly building the actual soil itself. But, plants actually allowed to grow in a natural way will do this far more effectively than simply uncollected short lawn trimmings, which don’t add much goodness anyway. 

But do we want to have these neat areas of lawn for other purposes, socialising, sport, resting and recreation without the dangers of hidden litter? 

But even these short areas of grass can be cut more sensitively in Spring in any areas with lots of flowers.Then notable patches of flowers anywhere during the rest of the year simply can be neatly mown around, this can be done attractively if flowering patches are nicely shaped in a way that suits the layout of the surrounding area. 

A simple strip of longer grass along the west side avenue. The longer grass keeps the soil below cooler so there is also more moisture for the tree and other organic life. Even in this formal area the meadow strip can be parallel to the path and neatly defined by shorter grass either side. This strip I would like wider, the mower is still driving too close, all these patches should be as wide as the canopies above. Here we just have mainly wall barley though this could be controlled as an annual by an additional cut for a few years to remove the seed heads but actually works well in terms of potential to add more wildflowers, in fact chicory and lucerne (alfafa) could be growing along here consistently in a few years, especially if we use ‘green hay’ from the chicory banks nearby.

This is immediately less work, less fuel, more time to do other things.

Then there are new and mature trees. With not enough staff or equipment the most appalling and most used approach is to drive in doughnuts around these trees as closely as possible with the greatest skill apparently, leaving as little grass as possible for the poor people strimming to cut after. If the giant ride-on doesn’t actually hit the tree, fracturing the trunk at the most vital place or pull branches off with the anti-roll bar, then it still continuously compacts the surrounding soil, greatly affecting the health of the tree’s root system.  

From a logistical viewpoint it also means much more work, with the machine having to spend so much more time spinning around all the obstacles. 

From a sustainability and cost point of view this means machines get damaged and wear out quicker as well as more fuel. Even more importantly the actual drivers get worn out more quickly too, these big heavy machines with little in the way of sophisticated suspension are not so good for the human skeleton or diesel fumes from the exhaust and dust kicked up by the cutting deck good for the lungs.

Then once the ride on has passed along come the strimmers, these high revving machines that are supposed to be throttled gently to cut around tree bases. But they don’t cut well at low revs and again the only priority is aesthetic neatness and with thousands of trees, most develop a line of strimmer damage all around the base, just where the tree trunk meets the ground containing all kinds of micro organisms, both beneficial but also potentially deadly to the tree. 

This cycle happens all year, the trees are damaged more, the soil and life it contains equally so, and no other useful habitat or food for wildlife can be found in the surrounding lawn. 

In Summer the grass dies back anyway as the trees suck away all the nearby moisture! Just once a year then conveniently as it gets busy and there is more problems with less pleasant litter, the tatty remains of the grass can be neatened around the trees without heavy machinery. 

Then to continue throughout the whole year we reach Autumn and the grass thickens again and deciduous trees lose their leaves. So now lets cut all the grass everywhere again, pick up all the leaves and take them elsewhere to mix with invasive plant fragments whilst turning into compost (this is another blog on green ‘waste’). So we remove the leaves from under the trees which would replenish their nutrients and so the grass still grows more thickly and we can still neatly cut it. If the grass is longer again once the leaves fall they will stick in the grass that is shaped like the above canopy. Other leaves can be blown back into this longer grass. The grass and leaves will then both decompose and release their nutrients back into the soil and the grass would not need to be cut around the trees the following Spring. 

If we leave surrounding grassland long and do cut it we can also use the hay as additional organic matter around trees. 

We have been doing this in certain areas, for example a dozen damsons and rare trees planted along the Albany Road project by us or the council are mulched with meadow cuttings and shredded leaf compost, or the black oaks beside the smaller tennis court with their own leaves and cuttings from the nearest chicory bank. 

The black oaks (Quercus nigra) are widely mulched as far as their canopies with green hay from elsewhere and from the surrounding longer grass. They can also be mulched with fallen leaves. Here the tree pits have been left not weeded most of the year but the mulch is still pretty effective pre leaf-fall and the trees look healthy and are undamaged. Any unwanted vegetation around the tree is also much easier to remove due to the mat of organic matter on the surface and looser and softer soil below which any weeds are mainly growing on top of. 

All of this would save a massive amount of work, time, energy, equipment and destruction of our surrounding environment. 

All these resources could then be used to do better things, buy the range of equipment we actually need, have more budget for other resources and have more people power to actually look after the plants and wildlife and manage the park organism more rationally.

This is why controlling the most invasive plants effectively and efficiently is the only pragmatic approach. We have armies of volunteers who can come in and help but much of the time they are hacking huge clumps of bramble in a pointless manner which means it returns over a wider area six months later. 

These people could be helping create a much higher standard of planting in the rest of the park. This I need them to do increasingly, as my team and myself get older and we are generally less physically capable ourselves, with the decline in older staff obviously not possibly matchable with incoming younger staff. 

All kinds of organisations and companies come, from ones appreciated as benevolent and caring to more corporate entities that many people are critical about. I totally understand this but it is more important to make use of this as a resource to get things done and also more positively facilitate these large private companies in contributing more to the world. The process just needs to be made way more practically effective and not just for PR and tax incentives for a corporate entity operating in a more ‘charitable’ context. The reality is though the Burgess friends are 2.6k strong, people are busy and can only help so much in a practical sense. 

We also have an ongoing program of regular volunteers but this is more sporadic and more working with small groups or just individuals who can benefit from being here but also are capable of helping us look after the park without slowing things down, but I only have so much time to communicate with people and get everything done at the same time. 

But even without better resources we can do things so much more intelligently and in sync with the environment that we need to cherish. 

I need your support to make it happen as we evolve management plans and ultimately a contract of maintenance for the park, however it is organised in the future.

You can all do your little bit, simply bring positive energy and share it about.

Support and help each other and communicate respectfully and patiently. Don’t behave in ways that upset other people or all the other plants and wildlife here. Keep your dogs under control, pick up a bit of litter, scatter some seeds. Pick up some fallen branches and return them to a wild area. Learn about and enjoy being around plants and nature! Forage for small amounts of food. Report any problems, ideas or things you are doing already to make our park a better place for all!  

We have great responsibility because we are all head gardeners of the planet. 

We can be also all be head arborists, ecologists, conservationists, naturalists,  andscapers, botanists, biologists, zoologists, permaculturists and regenerative agriculturalists too! We can combine the best of all these ideas to form the best practice in a humble manner.

There are some incredible new approaches to managing green space and restoring the health of the soil, fauna and flora of green space.

Below some links to permaculture and food forest networks

The Balkan Ecology Project. Using permaculture principles to create attractive wildlife friendly and food growing spaces in a more sustainable closed system using sound design principles involving topography to improve moisture availability and a better understanding of how plants can be carefully positioned to interact better as a productive community as well as restoring the health of the soil biome. 

https://nordicpermaculture.org/en/forest-gardening-and-food-forestry
https://balkanecologyproject.blogspot.com/2024/01/happy-new-year-from-polyculture-project.html

To even begin to have such ambitions we have to be quite fierce and controlling to evolve the best population of plants for our own wellbeing and the diversity of the rest of life around us. This is because we influence the planetary flora and fauna so much that it is evolving to survive our abuse by becoming more robust but potentially less diverse as well. But beyond the armies of thorns, stingy and poisoned plants, diversity remains. Once we are firm with the most invasive plants, we can more successfully maintain the rest and also design the park to become more productive and sustainable for all of the organisms that visit or live in it.  

But the rest of the time there are so many ways that we can become more gentle and efficient in the way we manage the organic environment around us. Then hopefully together we can develop a more sustainable practice that makes the park a more beautiful place for us all!

Greg Smith, Head Gardener, Burgess Park. 23/11/24