England and Wales have lost about 97 percent of their hay meadows in a century
A hay meadow looks wild, but it is a farming invention dating to the Iron Age, when tools for cutting hay first appeared. Left to grow each summer and mown once, these fields once blanketed rural Britain. Over the past century roughly 97 percent of those in England and Wales have vanished.
Strictly, a meadow is open ground covered in grasses, herbs and other non-woody plants, sometimes with scattered trees. In farming terms it differs from a pasture: a meadow is not grazed through the summer but allowed to grow tall and then cut for hay, whereas a pasture is grazed. Mowing let Iron Age farmers store the summer's surplus growth for winter, keep animals in enclosures, control breeding more easily and spare forests from winter grazing.
The losses are steep. Ecologist John Rodwell estimates the scale of decline in England and Wales, and fewer than 15,000 hectares of lowland meadow survive across the United Kingdom, mostly in small fragments. A quarter of the UK's meadows lie in Worcestershire, where Foster's Green Meadow is a major site. Frequent mowing, mineral fertiliser, manure and insecticides all thin out the wildlife that meadows support, from courting and nesting birds to pollinating insects.
Not all meadows are man-made. Perpetual meadows persist because conditions hold back trees indefinitely: alpine meadows above the tree line, coastal ones kept open by salt spray, prairies shaped by drought and fire, and wet meadows waterlogged most of the year. Transitional meadows are temporary, appearing when cleared land is abandoned and lasting until scrub shades out the grasses. Before European colonisation, Algonquian, Iroquois and other Native American peoples cleared and burned forest to create such openings for deer, and some of today's meadows began that way thousands of years ago.
Historically, wild grazing animals probably kept many meadows open. Where they have vanished, restoration projects bring back deer, elk, wild horses and goats, and the European Tauros Programme goes further. The EU's farm policy subsidises meadow management, and campaigners urge replacing city lawns with meadows by mowing less, which measurably increases plant diversity.
Source: Meadow
