At Long Mead, we have been engaged in meadow creation since 2005. In 2018, we established the Thames Valley Wildflower Meadow Restoration Project (TVWMRP) with the  challenge of creating a connected meadow network between the ancient meadows of the Oxford Meads and Farmoor CTA. We have also been creating new meadows in Oxford to buffer the Marston Meads SSSIs. It is a challenge, indeed! New research from our partners at the Floodplain Meadows Partnership (FMP) shows the nature of this challenge:

In 2020, they reviewed 30 years of meadow creation involving 160 floodplain meadow sites. They found only a 25% success rate. Due to a lack of data, the study was unable to compare restoration techniques, and concluded that the failures were largely due to poor post-restoration management.

It is clear is that we still don’t really know how to ensure that the majority of restorations are on the path to success. But our experience shows that the old maxim is likely also to be true ‘if you fail to prepare, be prepared to fail’: understanding the technical requirements for meadow creation is critical.

Integral to TVWMRP, therefore, is a long-term research program to document the technical aspects of the restoration, as well as the consequences of restoration for biodiversity. With our FMP colleagues we are studying how restoration of botanical diversity correlates with the fraction of soil organic carbon stored. In ancient meadows, the top 15cm contains an impressive 100 tonnes per hectare. With a network of local entomologists, and partners at Oxford Brookes University, we have started to create a species-list of invertebrates for Long Mead (an ancient meadow) in order to understand the extent to which invertebrates are able to colonise new meadows over time.

Our preferred method of restoration is to spread ‘green hay’. There are good reasons for this, the most important being that ancient meadows contain well over 100 species while commercial seed mixes only contain around 25.

In preparing the recipient site, the machinery needs to match the prevailing conditions. For some fields, mowing followed by chain-harrowing is sufficient to achieve a suitable tilth, for others a disc harrow and/or power harrow is needed. This all has to be assessed on the ground by experienced practitioners.

Another critical factor is the distance between the donor site and recipient site for, as soon as the forage harvester chops up the hay, the clock is ticking. If left for more than a few hours, the hay will turn to compost. The thickness of the hay is also critical. It should look like a green lace covering the brown earth. If the wind is blowing, the spread is wider and thinner, so again it is critical to have an experienced observer to monitor progress.

At Long Mead, we hand-propagate the rarer plant species with our community network: Nature Recovery Network. This means that local people (including schoolchildren, retired people, people with learning disabilities, and those with physical and mental health challenges) play an integral and critical role in our landscape-scale restoration project, as well as in our research. We are currently developing a protocol for community-based wildflower propagation that includes gathering data for each species as well as trialing low-cost ways for community organisations to engage in plant propagation for meadow creation.

After five years of hard work, we have created an amazing bottom-up network of local people for nature recovery. We have commitment or promises from all the landowners on the left bank of the Thames from Stanton Harcourt to Port Meadow, as well as a good number of those on the Cherwell opposite the Marston Meads, and we have our whole community engaged in the project.

Today, there are around 130ha of new meadows connecting the ancient meadows in the Oxford Meads and Farmoor CTA. Between Pinkhill and Eynsham locks, both banks of the Thames are now bordered with species-rich meadows. Around 60ha of these have been created under Natural England’s agri-environment schemes and 70ha have been created as part of TVWMRP.

But will our success in creating a network of people for nature recovery be matched by the success of a network of meadows for the recovery of nature? Only time will tell - recent research from the Centre for Hydrology and Technology predicts that it will take 150 years for the majority of plant species to colonise a new meadow site. Let’s hope, at least, that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will enjoy a richness equal to our ancient meadows.

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