Fabulous Fritillaries!
I had a really nice road trip last week. I spent a couple of days in the Welsh borders looking at wildflower meadows, but en route dropped in to see the lovely folk at the Floodplain Meadows Partnership. They were doing their annual Fritillary count at North Meadow, outside Cricklade. It's an almost mythical site for botanists. It's a Lammas meadow, which makes it exceptional enough, but it has an fascinating community of plants, including the majority of the country's Fritillaries. This might seem like a bold claim, and many are planted nowdays, but there are a lot there. A lot!
Fritillaria meleagris is one of those native plants - or near native plants - which are both rather mysterious and impossibly exotic. I've planted them in our meadows here in Somerset, as they enjoy wetter ground - I love them, as do the local bumblebees.
Sitting on a floodplain betwen the rivers Thames and Churn, the meadow spends some time under water over the winter, which makes for fascinating botany. Lammas meadows like this were once common but are now very rare, as beautiful as they are fragile. We sometimes have seed harvested from North Meadow, which is one of the most extraordinary and diverse mixes we sell.
The Partnership have been running Fritillary counts there since 1999, so things ran very smoothly. A gaggle of volunteers gathered in an assemblage of floppy hats and high viz jackets, and we were paired off to survey GPS located quadrats across the site. The least competent were gently paired with the most, and I took no exception to spending my day with Sarah, a botany lecturer... she was very patient!
It was a fun day, and very instructive. Fritillary numbers in spring seem to vary according to winter rains, and plants will become dormant in extreme conditions. They're encouragingly resilient. The flowering population, it turns out, is only a minority of the plants on site - which makes IDing many of the others quite demanding! The flowering plant in this quadrat is pretty obvious, but can you spot the other 13?
Anyway, the point of this blog was to highlight the work the Floodplain Meadows Partnership does. Like so many of our most valuable conservation NGOs, they are small and focused, pushing a really important science driven agenda. They rely on well-informed and enthusiastic volunteers and a core group of highly motivated and qualified staff. I'm delighted to be able to support them through our donor programme.