Everyone driving through the countryside this year must have noticed the huge crop of buttercups in the fields. "Hold the flower under your chin and if there is a glow reflected [isn't there always?] you like butter!" Now we read in the Farmers' Journal of July 1st that there is money in wild flowers. An article by Eileen McCabe tells the readers that if their fields are covered in wild flowers they may be in the way of business on this alone. You should check your fields for sorrel, tall crowfoot, corn marigold, marjoram, St John's Wort and a few named others and then get in touch with Sandro Cafolla at Nature by Design, (056-42526). He may be interested, from what you can tell him, in harvesting the flowers or paying you to harvest them for him. He is interested in a good extent of wild flowers, say an acre. What are weeds to most farmers may be the stuff of medicines to others, not forgetting those whose principal aim is to protect plant diversity.
Sandro and his colleague Monica Fleming, who run the Design By Nature business, are concerned about the 851 native plants we have, which according to the article, date from the time before the island was inhabited, and a further 500 which cane with the early settlers. These two collect seeds and propagate plants by cuttings. Their nursery is in Carlow but they have 32 acres in commercial farm production of wild flowers in Kilkenny, Kildare and Wexford. Basically they go on the farmers' land and offer to buy weeds. "Most farmers are delighted". County Councils also buy for parks and roadside planting. You can see an example of wild flower planting on the esker ridges in Co Offaly on the new road between Tullamore and Athlone. And wild flowers are catching on in private gardens. It's important that we use our own wild seeds, not imported. For botanists tell us, the article says, that our plants will flower at the same time as the insects need them. Imported seeds may flower at a different time, affecting the food chain.
In Britain, we are told in the Sunday Telegraph, wild flowers planted in place of crops on poor arable land have resulted in an increase in wild life, including skylarks and butterflies, in a farm in North Yorkshire. Twenty-foot strips in a farm near Malton, along hedges and streams at the edge of fields, are planted with wild flowers, and this suppresses weeds that could invade the crops on the field itself. David Bellamy, well-known on TV is delighted. "What I've been advising for 40 years," he says. Rachel Carson is being vindicated.