Kew Gardens Hoping To Revive Wild Flower Meadows

Fri, 09 Sep 2011

A new project to help restore native flowers and plants to Britain's vanishing meadows is underway at Kew Gardens .

Launched last month, the UK Native Seed Hub at Kew's Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place, West Sussex, will grow plants which are difficult to cultivate in restoration programmes.

The £750,000, four-year project has started by growing lowland meadow species such as the devil's bit scabious, cuckoo flower, green field-speedwell and harebell at temporary seed production beds in a walled nursery, which are open to the public until the end of September.

Larger permanent seed beds over 2.5 acres are being prepared to harvest seeds that can then be grown on by seed companies for conservation groups and landowners to use.

Project leader Michael Way said: "Lowland meadows are an important part of our grasslands but in England and Wales, we’re down to less than 10,000ha (25,000 acres)."

Robin Probert, head of technology and training at Kew, commented: 'This is a habitat that has suffered the most over the past decades… only about two per cent of the old species-rich meadows are left since the Second World War."

'What we'll do is hold these collections in our seed bank and take them through the first critical stage of multiplication so we will end up with a larger quantity of high-quality seeds that we can make available to commercial seed companies. They can then produce the large volumes of plants that are required."

Paul Smith, head of the Millennium Seed Bank, added: "Use of appropriate native plants will help landowners create diverse habitats, which will ultimately provide a healthier landscape for us all."

The project is being carried out in partnership with the High Weald Landscape Trust's Weald Meadows Initiative, based in West Sussex.
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