Green-winged orchid

Bill Meek charts the story behind the beautiful and rare meadow flower, which was once commonly found in Lincolnshire’s hay meadows.

Britain’s success in World War II was dependent upon increasing food production – “dig for victory” was the cry.

In Lincolnshire as elsewhere, heaths, ancient flowery grasslands and marsh were ploughed and converted for food production. But in the post-war years the predicted return of the old ways did not materialise and decision-makers continued to encourage greater and greater production of home-grown food with generous subsidies.

Machinery got bigger and as a consequence so did the fields, and the rural population dwindled. Neglected corners were swept away and crops were made ‘cleaner’ using an array of novel chemicals.
This has become known as the ‘second Agricultural Revolution’, and the farmers of Lincolnshire led the way.

The most profound changes in our county’s landscape occurred in areas where integrated mixed crop and stocking systems had prevailed: as conservation pioneer Ted Smith has it, “on claylands like the Lindsey Middle Marsh and the Central Vale and on the Spilsby Sandstone country around the southern edges of the chalk Wolds”.

Hay for horses
Hay meadows had been an integral part of this older landscape. Generally sited on fertile soils and ‘shut up’ in summer, meadows produced extravagant flushes of floral colour in a predictable succession as the season progressed, were alive with insects, and provided the most perfectly evocative and iconic of all English rural environments.

Meadows were generally cut around July, after which the aftermath, or in Lincolnshire, ‘eddish’, would be grazed. In the old days hay meadows were valued over other land, as to run out of hay for the horses was a major problem.

Before the 1960s, hay meadows were so common in Lincolnshire that no-one even thought to protect them. But by 1965, it was apparent that so rapid and widespread was the destruction of old meadows that a race was on to protect a few of the best examples before it was too late.

Meadow flowers
A search ensued for forgotten corners presided over by old or inactive farmers who had been slow or unwilling to move with the times. There were heartbreaking losses where amazing meadows were destroyed on the cusp of being saved, including one of the very best in the country at the foot of the northern Wold scarp at Worlaby, eventually destroyed in 1970.

But an important few were acquired, mostly by the Wildlife Trust, and today these act both as a reminder of an idyll lost only in relatively recent times, and as a home for a huge variety of wildlife.

It was the sharp decline in certain charismatic meadow flowers which prompted alarm about loss of meadows in the first place, and many formerly familiar blooms have now become extremely uncommon.

Probably the foremost example of this unique vulnerability must be the beautiful green-winged orchid, which may occur in populations of thousands in older meadows and other grassland, but appears unable to survive any change of regime. Thanks in no small part to the Wildlife Trust, and against the odds, we can still find this beautiful orchid in 15 or so places in Lincolnshire. Try Heath’s Meadows near Bratoft, where thousands may be seen in spring.

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