Wildflower meadows at Tehidy used to seed nature recovery across Cornwall

Though iconic in our image of the countryside, wildflower meadows have been lost at a staggering rate – 97% since WW2 – as a result of changing land use and agricultural practice. Recent decades have seen concerted efforts to halt the decline of wildflower meadows in the UK and increased interest in managing lawns, verges and other grasslands for wildflowers. Tehidy Country Park is home not just to the largest area of woodland in west Cornwall (250 acres), but also a thriving species-rich wildflower meadow, seeds from which are helping bring wildflowers back to sites across Cornwall.

Volunteers from the Penwith Landscape Partnership (PLP) joined site managers from CORMAC at Tehidy earlier this month, making the most of perfect dry weather conditions to harvest seed from an area of the meadow, located on the North Cliffs in the northwest of the Country Park. As well as helping increase grassland species diversity in Penwith as part of PLP’s work on the First and Last – Our Living Landscape initiative, some of this year’s seedstock will also be sown in Cornwall Council sites receiving wildlife boosts through the ERDF funded Making Space for Nature (MS4N) project.

Starting from a very low base of available wildflower sites, seed can be in short supply, and having a local site with proven ability to thrive in the Cornish climate is a real benefit. The Tehidy mix includes yellow rattle, a semi-parasitic wildflower, whose roots attach to those of coarse gasses, drawing nutrients from them and thereby reducing the grasses advantage over less aggressive wildflowers, and has been seen to establish well on other Cornish sites, including East Pool Park and Crembling Well in previous years.

Around 50kg of seed were collected using a brush harvester, kindly supplied by the PLP and painstakingly hand sieved by the volunteers.

If you’d like to find out more about meadow regeneration in Cornwall, visit: Wildflower Collective - Rewilding, Wildflower, Pollinators. The collective’s aim is to create 568,210 square metres of new wildflower habitat – that’s 1 square metre for every resident in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – helping nature to recover, bringing increased beauty, more wildlife and climate resilience back to our landscapes.

Tips for creating a small-scale wildflower patch can be found at: Meadow Creation Guidance (cornwall.gov.uk)

And you can join the volunteers at Tehidy Country Park by contacting: countryside@cormacltd.co.uk