Verging on Madness

Outside my house there’s a big patch of roadside verge. My neighbour mows his end whenever he hasn’t got anything better to do, which is pretty often. He puts on a red bandana and goes to war on nature and untidiness, which is what he thinks happens when nature isn’t under the thumb. Or maybe he is simply copying the deer-cropped parks of the gentry that lawns originally aped. He is a military man, as it happens. I mow the bit outside my place with a scythe every Spring and every August, to mimic the conditions in a proper hay meadow and encourage that suite of plants. (Nowadays people have to say ‘wildflower meadow’ because farmers have got us all used to the idea that there aren’t flowers in hay meadows any more).

My bit of verge has knapweed and milkmaids and celandines and cowslips and various vetches and mouse-ear and dog’s mercury, cow-parsley and so on. Quite a lot of so- on, actually. And some plants that you might think are weeds, though you really shouldn’t. ‘Weeds’ may mean something to a gardener, but not to a conservationist. It’s not the best bit of verge around, but it’s better than my neighbour’ s  end, a sterile bit of lawn with a few daisies I expect he would like to get rid of.

I have tried to understand people like my neighbour. I’m sure some of them think they are being public spirited. Sometimes when the companies the council pays to mow the verges adopt enlightened verge mowing policies and leave areas uncut, people like him step in to cut them anyway, either thinking they are doing us a favour or maybe  because they  have a personal difficulty with life verdant and unsuppressed. Most of the time they irritate the hell out of me too much for me to try to empathise. Like the other day when I was coming home from a bit of beekeeping and saw someone who had taken to the strimmer to cut a piece of verge that was nothing to do with him, that did not obstruct any driver’s view and  was too narrow for his ride-on mower. I was close to stopping and remonstrating, but there were cars behind me and I carried on, fuming, until I came to a bend on a country lane where one or two people have got together to protect a length of hedge bank. This bank is now is a roadside nature reserve. In many ways it is as unremarkable or remarkable a verge as any other. But there was a notice on a phone post which I stopped to read. It was a list of plant species present on a hundred yards or so of roadside verge.

I’ve always loved road verges, since I was a boy of 5 or 6 walking the two miles to school every morning. I used to pick flowers for the nature table, and my teacher decided I was better employed drawing  flowers or birds in my Nature Diary than doing sums with everyone else.  My favourite entry is captioned ‘This morning I saw a Great Hairy Mullein on the way to school…’  Maths is still not my top skill, but a pleasure in the small and finely detailed plants of the hedgerow as seen through the sharp eyes of a small boy has stayed with me. Maybe the arguments for conservation are rational enough, but they seem more powerful when backed up by that sort of love.

Even with my history with verges I was impressed by this list of plants growing on a bank you could pass in your car a hundred times without remarking:

Species present:

Field maple

Yarrow

Creeping bent

Garlic mustard

Sweet vernal grass

Cow parsley

Lords and ladies

False brome

Common knapweed

Centaurea nigra

Creeping thistle

Wild basil

Pignut

Hawthorn

Lesser celandineMeadowsweet

Wild strawberry

Cleavers

Cut-leaved cranesbill

Herb robert

Wood avens

Ground ivy

Ivy

Hogweed

Yorkshire fog

Imperforate St Johns wort

Perforate St John’s wort

Holly

Meadow vetchling

Rough hawkbit

Honeysuckle

Wood rush

Dog’s mercury

Burnet saxifrage (72 plants)

Ribwort plantain

Broad leaved plantain

Silverweed

Tormentil

Barren strawberry

Cowslip

Blackthorn

Bracken

Field rose

Broad leaved dock

Greater stitchwort

Black bryony

Dandelion

Coltsfoot

Nettle

Germander speedwell

Most of these plants will provide nectar or foliage to feed a wide range of insects as well as bees and butterflies and moths. Most butterflies, for example, have to lay their eggs on a particular plant because that is all their caterpillars will eat. Some feed on a particular nectar, so you won’t get Orange Tip butterflies if you don’t have Milkmaids. Things on this list that we call weeds, like nettles and docks, all host particular insects.  The nettle supports over 40 species of insect including the Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock butterfly larvae. At that rate the 49 species of plant listed on this short piece of verge may between them support a number of insects and other creatures that I haven’t the knowledge to even start to guess at, and those insects will themselves be a food resource for other creatures. That’s not counting any shrews and voles and mice and moles and weasels that find such spots congenial. These verges exemplify the ecological value of complexity, something that the chemical farmers on the other side of such hedge banks actively destroy.

Maybe if I had stopped I might have told your man with the strimmer some of this. Maybe that wouldn’t have gone so well. I hope I’m not simply preaching to the converted here out of frustration with the mad mowers who don’t realise that verges are the last refuges of organisms being farmed to extinction everywhere else. Certainly my feelings, having read a notice posted in a simple hedge-bank, were more positive and joyful afterwards than when I passed the mad strimmer. I’m so glad to have met some people who care about this stuff and are quietly and even tolerantly trying to change things. Thank you. You saved my day.