A good blog on ways of protecting flowers on road verges rather than thinking them pretty or untidy.
These two photos taken two days apart near Claughton, Garstang, Lancs show the damage of excess mowing
With the success of Plantlife’s rural road-verge campaign for more sympathetic vegetation management (100,000+ signed to the petition) https://plantlife.love-wildflowers.org.uk/roadvergecampaign and their excellent guidelines https://www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/our-work/publications/road-verge-management-guide you might be wondering why it doesn’t just happen, after all it seems such an obvious thing to do and there are no down-sides, right?
Wrong, unfortunately, there are still large numbers of people complaining about the weeds/the grass not being cut and it looking a ‘mess’ particularly in urban areas and that makes a difference; scroll below the article to see comments https://news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/2019/06/17/our-roadside-verges-a-fine-balance-to-strike/
A good summary of the problems that councils have is here, https://connectingfornature.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/nomowmay-a-discourse-on-the-complexities-of-local-authority-grassland-management/ and in summary it is essentially no money, no time, the wrong equipment, and what do we do with the long grass when we do cut it?
In Middlesbrough the council was proposing to save money this year (£60k?) simply by changing the interval time between cuts in urban…
View original post 487 more words
