Wildflower planting

On Wednesday 30 November, the garden team and Catriona Bass, together with her volunteers from the Long Mead Thames Valley Wildflower Meadow Restoration Project planted out nearly 1,000 of the rare and slow-growing floodplain meadow wildflowers in the Meadow, which we spread with seed from the ancient meadow at Long Mead in 2020.

We partnered with Long Mead’s Carefarming and Plant Propagation Group and partners at Bridewell Gardens in raising these plants by hand over the past year from seed collected from Long Mead and adjacent ancient meadows.

We were also delighted to be joined by a number of Oxford University geography undergraduates and members of the OU Nature Conservation Society who we hope enjoyed the day as much as we did!

Christ Church Meadow is one of the restoration sites that Long Mead are using to monitor the success of hand-propagated plants in the field, over time. In order to increase our chances of finding the plants again, we have laid out the plants in batches of 10 on a north-south axis, marking each with a GPS and an aluminium disc with a number so that they can be located with a metal detector.

Species planted include Meadowsweet, Ragged Robin, Dropwort, Quaking Grass, Devil’s Bit Scabious, Ladies Bedstraw and Great Burnet. We chose to plant the majority near to the Broad Walk fence line in the hope that they will be more visible to passers-by in the summer months.