Warwick Spinney's green space & Community Meadows in Eynsham
There are many meadow projects being undertaken within Oxfordshire, some are small community projects and others are larger, landscape scale initiatives. These projects are important for helping to connect and link our fragmented lowland grasslands. Included in these areas are churchyards, village greens, grass verges and even gardens managed as hay meadows.
Two of these projects include a community green space, Warwick Spinney, at the edge of Benson in South Oxfordshire, and the work undertaken within community meadows by the Nature Recovery Network, which supports nature recovery projects in Eynsham and surrounding parishes.
Both Warwick Spinney and the community meadows project at Eynsham received funding from TOE's (Trust for Oxfordshire's Environment) Local Environment Fund, which was key to the enhancement plans becoming a reality. Every year towards the end of the summer at Warwick Spinney, volunteers scythe an area of grassland enhanced in 2019 with wildflowers, including Yellow Rattle. In the photo below, you can clearly see the impact that the Yellow Rattle is making by suppressing patches of grass within the field. Nature Recovery Network volunteers planted bulbs of Snake’s-head Fritillary within some of their community meadows at Eynsham. Snake’s Head Fritillary is Oxfordshire’s county flower and this iconic spring plant of floodplain meadows is fertilised by bumblebees.
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