Over the last 50 years the wildlife of Britain has been razed to the ground, says Andrew Byfield. "The countryside has lost its colour, to be replaced by awfully efficient, awfully productive agricultural land, at the expense of our wild plants and so much more."
Byfield, one of the wildflowers experts at wild-plant charity Plantlife, has spent his life studying our plants, and traces the gradual erosion of our wildflower species back to changing agricultural practices and the huge alterations in our landscape. "Plants are the basis of the food chain. If you take a cornfield, for example, a few decades ago that field would have been full of knotgrass and poppies, and their seeds would have been food for grey partridges.
"In the arable fields, you can see that areas which in the past would have been stuffed with common poppies, yellow marigolds, pink cockles, all the weeds that were hated by farmers, are now clear of all those plants. Farmers use more powerful herbicides, and there are more hi-tech seed- cleaning processes, and as a result all the wildflowers that would have been there 50 years ago are gone." Byfield concedes that for farmers this is obviously good news, but points out: "What follows is that all the insects and birds that would have fed on those plants are now going too, or in some cases have already gone. The birds – the tree sparrow, the corn bunting, the cirl bunting – that would have found the fat hen seeds or knotgrass seeds in between the stubble in winter, and managed to survive the cold weather on those seeds, now just don't survive winter."
The way we handle permanent grassland has also changed, Byfield explains: "A 100 years ago, a meadow would have been full of cowslips, green-winged orchids, white and red clover, yarrow and thistles. And the clover would have been drawing hundreds of bees and hoverflies, both critical parts of the ecosystem. But now the farming technique involves putting lots of fertiliser and selective herbicides on to the earth, and that's bad for wildflowers.
It may seem counter-intuitive that fertiliser is bad for wildflowers, but that is the case. "Firstly, the fertiliser really encourages the more thuggish plants, the grasses, and they grow quickly and tall, and shade out the smaller, less competitive plants like orchids, for example. And then wildflowers prefer earth with a relatively low level of nutrients as well."
Herbicides have also caused problems. "You can now buy selective herbicides that just wipe out the broad-leafed flowering plants and leave the grasses. The old meadows were not very productive in terms of grass, but they were incredibly rich in wildlife."
But it isn't all catastrophe, and organisations like Plantlife and Natural England are fighting back inch by inch. Public awareness of wildlife erosion over the last 50 years is higher than ever before. And Byfield is particularly happy about one project where Plantlife has managed to buy a 60-acre field which had been set aside for 15 years, which meant that the farmer had not treated it in all that time. "It's next to one of our nature reserves and it's a magical place now. If you go there any day of the summer, it's full of orchids, oregano, ox-eye daisy, wild liquorice and rock roses, you'll hear skylarks overhead, there are meadow brown and marbled white butterflies flitting through the flowers, and grasshoppers everywhere." It's a small step in the right direction.
