Thank you for your support! Over 2000 have signed the petition to save Hinksey's flood plain meadow from destruction.  

In celebration of National Meadows Day on 2nd July,  writer and environmentalist Catriona Bass has written this article on the importance of saving flood plain meadows such as Hinskey Meadow. She is co-founder of the Thames Valley Wildflower Meadow Restoration Project and owner of Long Mead LocalWildlife Site.

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Why it is so important to save our endangered floodplain wildflower meadows

If Oxford’s floodplain wildflower meadows were an animal there would be a stream of tourists from all over the world coming to see the last of their kind in the wild, they are that rare.   Imagine an area the size of Heathrow Airport broken into small pieces and scattered across the country, this is the few percent that remains after a century of destruction. Several precious fragments lie on the Thames around Oxford: Pixie Mead, Yarnton Mead, Long Mead, the Marston Meads and Hinksey Mead. Some are protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest and some are not - and so they continue to disappear under developments. Hinksey Meadow could be the next to go as it is now threatened by Oxford’s Flood Alleviation Scheme.

The problem for these 1000-year-old meadows is that they are already culturally extinct. Today, only a tiny handful of people have ever set foot into their glorious riot of flowers and only the handful of farmers who own them know their value in 21st century food production. This means that floodplain meadows can’t muster the great public campaigns that ancient woodlands, great crested newts, or even curlews do when threatened with destruction.

Nor do people understand the critical role that floodplain meadows could play in our 21st century fight against biodiversity decline. With over 40 different plants per metre square, they are among Britain’s most botanically diverse habitat and they provide food for an equally diverse range of wildlife, including some of our most threatened species. Their decline has already led to the extinction of the marsh fritillary butterfly in Oxfordshire.

Their highly absorbent soils play a vital role in flood management. They also filter our water, remove pollution, and their soils store carbon more effectively and more securely than woodlands. Indeed, new research from the Floodplain Meadows Partnership at the Open University Open University suggests that floodplain meadows store significantly more carbon than other grasslands and arable fields.

Unlike other biodiverse habitats such as ancient woodlands and wetlands, floodplain meadows provide all these ecosystem services (as we now call them) while continuing to play a fundamental role in 21st century food production. They supply nutrient-rich feed for fattening premium cuts of lamb and beef without the need for costly inputs like artificial fertilisers, pesticides, or herbicides.

With our now unpredictable weather, floodplain meadows provide a highly resilient crop. The diversity of species means that in wet years one set of plants flourish and in dry years others flourish, so the crop never fails - unlike monoculture arable crops that can get wiped out in a flood or a drought.

If floodplain meadows are now forgotten, they once played a central role in society. Until the mid-20th century, you would have walked along the Thames from Lechlade to Oxford through blooming swathes of sneezewort, pepper saxifrage, doddery dicks, crested dog’s tail, eggs and bacon, jack-go-to-bed-by-noon – their many affectionate names as colourful as their flowers, show how cherished in common culture they used to be. Indeed, they provided dyes for our clothing, flavourings for our drinks, and medicines to cure us from disease. Meadowsweet, for example, whose key active ingredient is salicylic acid, was grown commercially for manufacturing aspirin.

They were known by farmers as the ‘hospital fields’ since the nutrients of their many varied plants meant healthy livestock and low veterinary fees (and still do today for the few farmers that own them).

Until the arrival of artificial fertilisers, they were the most valuable land in the country since the winter floods renewed their fertility each year. Every prized acre was documented in the Domesday Book. Eynsham, for example, was noted as having 255 acres of meadow, 150 acres of this was Long Mead, which lies along the Thames upstream of the Swinford Toll Bridge. Any villager who owned a cow or a sheep was entitled to a strip of Long Mead for hay.

In the 20th century, Long Mead shared the fate of other floodplain meadows around Oxford and only a 30-acre fragment of the original remains. Seed from this Domesday meadow is now being used to try to restore riverside fields along the Thames and Cherwell rivers, to connect up the remaining fragments of the ancient Oxford Meads.

But there is no quick fix. It is predicted to take 150 years for the majority of species to colonise a restored site, according to research from the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology. Furthermore, most restoration projects are likely to fail. The Floodplain Meadows Partnership at the Open University documented only a 25% success rate in a study of 163 restoration projects that had been carried out over the last 30 years.

Saving floodplain meadows by moving them (translocation) turns out also to be wishful thinking. There is no scientific evidence of success, nor could there be. Imagine the topography of the floodplain: water seeps through, around and over the land, on its way to the river. Here it fills a tiny depression, there it dampens a higher piece of ground, over there is a small rise which is only inundated when it floods. These small changes in ground level over a vast area are what produce the particular diversity of wet-loving and dry-loving species and the floodplain meadows’ resilience. Long Mead has 120 different species of plant, some of their roots stretch more than two metres deep and are woven together in a fine tapestry. Hinksey Mead is similarly complex. When we understand this, grandiose proposals to translocate it to create the Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme begin to sound like something from a Soviet movie.

The chances of replicating 1000-year-old floodplain meadows, like Hinksey Mead are slim, even if the next generations manage to nurture the restoration work that we are starting now. They are a unique and irreplaceable part of our cultural heritage, no less than Stonehenge and the Rollright Stones. But unlike these museum pieces, floodplain meadows play a vital and complex role in our 21st century society, and not least in mitigating floods.

Oxford’s Flood Alleviation Scheme makes clear that the gains of the current design are contingent on variables connected with the level of climate change, the location of flood prone homes and businesses, and future development. What it doesn’t make clear is that the loss (of biodiversity, cultural heritage and ecosystem services connected with Hinksey Mead) is absolute. And this absolute loss is not just of local significance but of national and international significance.

Catriona Bass