What is Happening to our road verges?
🍀 Most residents of Northleach will be aware of the global biodiversity crisis. Human activities like urbanisation, deforestation, and pollution are significantly impacting natural ecosystems with the resulting loss of variety. To address this issue and try to reverse the decline, the UK Government has placed a specific duty on town and parish councils to play their part.
As is required, Northleach with Eastington Town Council has adopted a range of measures in its Biodiversity Policy, but perhaps the most immediately visible to the local community is the new approach to mowing of road verges. For the last two years, a number of verges across the town have been allowed to grow unmown for most of the year, giving the opportunity for a variety of flowers and grasses present on the verges to bloom.
Whilst the verges may have looked a little messy at times, the results of botanical surveying undertaken by volunteers on behalf of the council have been very encouraging and interesting. To date:
- Around 118 different plant species have been identified across the verges surveyed across Northleach.
- As many as 25 flowers and grasses typical of unimproved old grassland, a rare and precious habitat, have been found.
- Several uncommon species have been recorded, including the pretty ‘false oxlip’ by the A429 and bee orchids on verges just beyond the town.
It appears that some of our local verges contain fragments of old meadow grassland. This is an important habitat for wild plants and fungi and exactly the type of habitat which organisations like the Cotswold Conservation Board and PlantLife encourage us to protect and restore. The Council has decided therefore to continue with and expand the new wildflower verge scheme.
Currently however there is a lot of tall and coarse growth as well, indicative of ongoing high nutrient levels in the soil. Wildflowers tend to thrive in places with low soil fertility, so a revised mowing regime has been adopted for the coming season in an attempt to remove nutrients more quickly. The intention is to cut the selected verges, with the clippings collected to remove the nutrients, three times a year instead of once – at the end of May, July and September. This may mean a few flowers are removed before they have gone to seed but should help to improve biodiversity (and create a shorter, prettier sward) more quickly in the longer term. So please bear with us!
Volunteers wanted
A common misconception about “No Mow May” is that it is only done to save councils money by reducing the need for grass cutting. In practice allowing grass to grow long can even increase costs. When mowing resumes, the overgrown grass creates a much heavier load of clippings, which require collecting by hand and then disposal. This process is more labour-intensive.
Therefore, the council is seeking volunteers to help rake off the remaining clippings each time after our contractor has done their part! The contractor will collect the bulk of the clippings, but removing the finer material from the ground will improve the outcome. Please get in touch with us if you would like to help us maintain the verges near your home.
A secondary aim of the scheme was to provide roadside floral displays to slow down passing traffic. So why aren’t we seeding the verges to ensure a good display of flowers? This has been discussed, but at present it is believed that nutrient levels are too high for this to be successful for more than one season. In addition, with evidence that the original meadow seedbank may be still intact in many places, it is not thought to be either necessary or desirable at this stage. The situation will be kept under review and the Council may consider seeding any verges with poor diversity later in the year.
The Council also hopes that alongside biodiversity and traffic calming benefits, ‘wilder’ verges will bring health and wellbeing benefits to residents and visitors alike through increased proximity to nature as we go about our daily business.
