Four in the morning and a barn owl hunts over the hay meadows for another hour before heading to the barns where there is surely a brood of young waiting to be fed; it is a fruitless hour of quartering and the occasional dive into the sward before reappearing empty handed. The grasses, mainly false…
Tag: Hay meadow
Great Dixter in mid May
Parts of the garden are a riot; rich with the wayside plants of the Mediterranean and Balkans intermingled with the local and far flung. The Peacock Garden is dominated by bright yellow umbels of great fennel Ferula communis contrasting with the mauves of honesty Lunaria annua, greater meadow-rue Thalictrum aquilegifolium and, I think, dame’s rocket…
The South Charente in Late June
Under thundery skies, the herbaceous borders at Boisjarzeau are at their colourful best. The wet spring this year has saved on the watering but the garden meadows are unusually thick with false oat-grass and barren brome with little space for wildflowers. A sward full of yellow rattle would impede the grasses and promote floral diversity…
Casola in Lunigiana, Tuscany
The precipitous mountains of the Alpi Apuane hold the rarest and most sought after seams of white marble that are mainly worked on the western facing slopes high above Carrara where the quarries leave blazing, white scars on the bare peaks. On the eastern flanks, in the villages around Casola in Lunigiana, the lower hills…
Wet meadows in the Pyrénées-Orientales
2nd and 4th June 2023 The road to Spain and Andorra from Ax-les-Thermes is a busy, twisting road up a magnificent, mountain valley. Before the turn to Andorra, the main road to Barcelona cuts through a long tunnel which opens into a wide and open valley totally different in character to the steep valleys of…
Adders on the meadow
There are just a handful of traditional lowland hay meadows left in Southern England. On a land use map of Kent, Marden Meadow looks like a short line of postage stamps stuck on a large, white envelope; a remnant from a time when the only implements to work the land were scythes, carts and barrows…
Elenydd Meadows and Woodlands
10th June 2018 From the roadside, the hay meadows at Hirnant Farm (Caeau Hirnant) on the winding road along Craig Goch Reservoir are a rare picture of summer colour; yellow with rough hawkbit, bird’s foot trefoil, yellow rattle and buttercup, white with pignut and eyebright and dashed purple with red clover and marsh orchids. The…