King's College lawn becomes wildflower meadow

The gardeners at King’s College, Cambridge have broken with hundreds of years of tradition by deciding not to cut the site’s fabled lawn - which backs onto the River Cam. Over the past four years, a wildflower meadow has sprung up in its place and biodiversity there is thriving.

Will - I won't lie, I leapt at the opportunity to visit King's College and its wildflower meadow. And even from a distance here, it looks absolutely stunning with the yellows and reds and greens. But let's go down now and find out who's going to be taking us through the garden.

Steve - Hello, Hello. Yes. My name's Steve Coghill. I'm the head gardener at King's College Cambridge. And part of my responsibility has been to see the development and the flowering of this amazing wildflower meadow that we're standing in front of at the moment.

Will - Historically, the front of King's College, Cambridge here has been, dare I say it, fairly uniform, flat, and green for the most part. Certainly as I've ever seen it. That's not the case now.

Steve - Absolutely. As we sort of trundle through into the 21st century, there are other things that we need to look at. You know, we need to look at putting back more into nature, and that is part of this meadow that here we are right in the heart of Cambridge, and yet we have this amazing meadow that actually means so much to so many people over the last few years.

Will - Yeah. Do you want to just sort of walk and talk us through it, what we are looking at here?

Steve - Okay. Yeah. Well, the meadow itself, this is basically what you call a Lammas meadow because we cut it during Lammas time, which is the first week of August. And here we can see we have buttercups, we have ox eye daisies, we have Silene dioica, the red campions, coming through. We can see that the vernal layer of cowslips is already fading away and they'll be seeding back into the ground. If you have a look around the outskirts, you'll see that we've also got some poppies coming along and cornflower and corn chrysanthemum and a whole raft of native grasses that make up this amazing matrix.

Will - And I'm sure we're about to cover the scientific side of what this all means, but just from your own perspective, this looks great. It invokes a great sensation just to be here amongst it.

Steve - Wellbeing is a massively important thing, and meadows are wonderful because they have the wildlife component, they have the floral component, which is wonderful. You have the wind moving over the meadow, which when the meadow gets higher, you can hear that wonderful susurration as the wind moves over it. And then we cut a path through and then it's just great watching kiddies run through it. Sort of wiping their hands along, you know, stroking the plants as they go.

Will - Like Gladiator.

Steve - It is, it is honestly just like Gladiator but without the blood. So that's quite good.

Will - <laugh> a take home message for us all there.

Steve - I think so, yeah.

Will - We should probably move on to the science before that conversation devolves even further. And who better than the project's own Cecily Marshall…

Cecily - In terms of numbers of species, we found roughly three times as many species of plants and spiders and bugs. And we even found that bats are recorded three times as often over the meadow than over the lawn. We also have changes in the species composition. So the type of species that are using the meadow compared with the lawn. We are seeing grassland specialist species in the meadow now. So species that are rarer or declining, species that are characteristic of our traditional meadows. They're not species we've planted. They're species that just have arrived themselves, which is really rewarding to see.

Will - And perhaps we shouldn't expect too much from a fairly modest sized patch of lawn, but were there any effects on the carbon mitigation side of things?

Cecily - What we did find was reduced emissions from mowing and fertilising associated with a wildflower meadow compared with a lawn. So a fine lawn like ours at King's is conventionally managed by a regular regime of watering and also fertilising and some weed killer. So we have much lower emissions associated with managing the meadow. And that's good news. <laugh> for climate change mitigation.

Will - Did you see any effect on the temperature, because we talk a lot about heat islands and how trees are important in cities because they help lower the overall temperature in urban environments. Was that the case here as well?

Cecily - Actually what we found was that the wildflower meadows are more reflective than the remaining lawn is. Yeah. Which is probably a small effect, but it's associated with a reduced urban heat island effect rather than trapping it and holding it at ground level.

Will - Thanks to Cecily for that. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask Steven just how you could create a wildflower meadow of your own at home.

Steve - You can have a wildflower meadow in your own garden, no problem at all. The first tip is to if you've got a lawn, are there areas of the lawn that you can just stop mowing? Because if you do, then you might see all sorts of interesting things coming up through the lawn that you never knew you had. Then if you want to destroy your lawn in order to grow a little wildflower meadow you can use plug plants. Little plug plants in little containers that you can then sort of plant into an area of lawn that you've set aside and that will allow you to establish a meadow without wholesale destruction to start with. And then of course you can actually dig an area up, cultivate it, and then sow one of the many different wildflower seed mixes that there are available out there because you know it's best to have local seed, seed from plants that are growing in your region or your area or indeed in your county because you know that they're going to look right and they also know that they got the characteristics that you need to grow as well. It's very important.

Will - So there you are, science in your own backyard. Thanks to everyone for hosting me. It was a great privilege to see this in action and I speak for all of us when I say we're very excited to see what's next.