Save Our Wasteland

This blog is not just about the area the local conservation industry calls a nature reserve. That's fortunate because some of the best nature is where they have not managed. In fact at times we are tempted to draft a rule which goes "the less management the more nature". Because some of us know at least that the whole conservation industry agenda here amounts to a fraud upon the public and the public purse. There's no nature improvement going on here that comes close to the achievement of nature left to its own devices.

I said in a recent post that

"There are many miles of railway embankment, roadside verges and abandoned wasteland with more value for wildlife" than those managed parts of Blacka where farm livestock have been imported supposedly to be good for wildlife.

I should have added to the list, along with wasteland and verges, car parks.

Those track edges and the car park surrounds just outside SRWT's "nature reserve" are where you need to go to find the most delightful arrangements of wild flowers and grasses. The stretch of track that runs along to the west of the boundary wall belongs to nobody and isn't that great? A few years ago I approached all the possible landowners to find who was responsible for this track and none of them wanted to admit to it. They didn't want the bother. I thought of sticking a flag on it and making a claim. The only management that has happened to it in recent years has been when the electricity industry removed the power line to underground it along the main road, at the original instigation of Friends of Blacka Moor (the council and SWT not being bothered).

Now at the end of June especially when there has been a longish dry spell, The fringes of this track and the marshy area around the car park show a delightful spectacle of natural beauty that puts all the rest of Blacka and its misguided managers to shame. So the message has to be: save the wastelands from the curse of management.

Not being a botanist, and anyway sometimes getting my identifications wrong, I can only name a proportion of the species here and speculate about others. But the pleasure for me, and I'm sure it's the same with many others, is in seeing the fabulous arrangements and combinations composing multiple pictures. It's similar to the overlapping orchestrations of musical sounds heard in a May dawn chorus but this time it's visual. I've discovered too that you have to see it or try to photograph it. It has been an ambition of mine to get someone with the talent to paint examples of these scenes, but artists I've talked to say it's remarkable difficult, mainly because of the stylistic problem of getting good detail allied to an overall impression. So it has to be DIY with photos and some species identification, occasionally tentative.

To repeat, it's the combinations that are the magic, but some of the common plants in flower in this long gallery are:

Grasses: Cocksfoot, Meadow Grass, Rye Grass, Yorkshire Fog, Timothy, Bent Grass, Couch Grass.

Plantain, Meadow Buttercup, Orchid (probably one of the Marsh Orchids), Ragged Robin, Cow Parsley, Dock, Sorrel, Nettle, Deadnettle, Stitchwort, Bedstraw, Ragwort, Dandelion, Bittercress, Creeping Thistle, Marsh Thistle, Wood Avens, Red Clover, White Clover, Lady's Smock, Tufted Vetch, Raspberry, Bramble, Willowherb, Tormentil, Soft Rush, Woundwort, Hogweed,  Cotton Grass, .......

Not yet in flower: Angelica, Burdock, Rosebay Willowherb, Great Willowherb