HAVE YOU ever noticed the little trees sprouting from the tiny islands of soil amid the sea of concrete in supermarket car parks? Chances are, they鈥檙e rowans. In Britain, our forebears planted them to ward off evil spirits. Wild birds are drawn to their vivid orange-red berries, as are we.
Look closer at these brave specimens, however, and you may be surprised. The trees barely seem to be growing. And no wonder. They are trying to work out where on Earth they are: one moment they were seeds on the parental tree in Russia, the next they were growing in a Dutch nursery before being deposited in a British car park. It鈥檚 not surprising the poor things look ill. They are suffering from culture shock.
The story is much the same for wild-flower seeds. The cheapest are often from Russia, Poland or Hungary鈥攃ountries with relatively low labour costs. But, taken from a continental climate and dumped in Britain鈥檚 varied oceanic clime, the plants, and the creatures that depend on them, often fail to thrive. The downside of using such exotic stock is sometimes glaringly obvious. Not so long ago, anyone driving along the A9 trunk road through the Scottish Highlands would have seen road verges littered with dead shrubs. They were all killed by a frost that left the indigenous broom unscathed. Landscapers had sown broom seed all right, but not from local plants. 鈥淭he experience made Scottish authorities change their policies,鈥� says plant ecologist Andy Gordon. 鈥淣ow they are demanding only Scottish-grown material.鈥�
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Even Britain鈥檚 Forestry Authority has recently begun to realise the importance of using local material, says Gordon, whose company Forestart, based near Shrewsbury, has been collecting seeds from native British trees and shrubs for more than a decade.
Change is in the air, agrees Donald MacIntyre. He runs Emorsgate Seeds, long-time supplier of British wild-flower seeds that really are from British wild flowers. This year, he says, for the first time, the Environment Agency is using seeds propagated from local grasses and herbs in its riverbank landscaping schemes鈥攊nstead of standard grassland mixtures designed for city parks and playing fields.
But there is still some way to go. All sorts of oddities pop up in batches of commercial seed that purport to be wild-flower mixes. Agricultural variants of red clover and bird鈥檚-foot trefoil, the products of plant breeders rather than evolution, are common ingredients, says MacIntyre. These seeds may be a tenth of the price of the real thing, but they produce bigger plants with little staying power. A year or two after planting in the wild, they鈥檒l be gone.
Shasta daisy, a garden hybrid, often masquerades as native oxeye daisy. 鈥淭his is my indicator species of the use of wild-flower seed mixtures and has become a feature of new roads and grasslands,鈥� remarks botanist John Akeroyd. 鈥淚t can be spotted easily from a moving car.鈥�
鈥淢ost horticultural companies treat wild flowers as a joke,鈥� says MacIntyre. 鈥淓ighty per cent of the market is now supplying non-genuine wild-flower seeds.鈥�
Gordon, MacIntyre and Akeroyd are key players in a new initiative called Floral Locale, which aims to 鈥減ut wild plants back where they belong鈥�. Launched by the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife and the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, the scheme has a year鈥檚 funding from English Nature and the British arm of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Top of the agenda is an independent certification scheme, to allow consumers to identify the provenance of seeds and plants. Next is policy reform: 鈥淗uge amounts of money are going into government-backed schemes to recreate wild meadows, woods, hedgerows and road verges, but none of these ecological restoration schemes requires the use of native seeds,鈥� says ecologist Sue Everett, coordinator for Flora Locale.
Not one of the schemes designed to recreate traditional wild-flower grasslands on the South Downs of Sussex has used native-origin seed. But why sow Polish wild-flower seeds laced with agricultural grasses from North America and New Zealand, when there are local alternatives better suited to chalk grasslands?
Building work on the controversial Newbury bypass in Berkshire is now under way. When the construction crews leave, landscapers will arrive with trees, shrubs and grassland seed mixes. Where will these plants come from? The Highways Agency could encourage community nurseries to propagate plants from seeds collected locally, from old woodlands and meadows destroyed by the road. So far, it hasn鈥檛.
One organisation which does aim to link plants, people and places in this way is environmental charity Common Ground. As part of its celebration of 鈥渓ocal distinctiveness鈥�, this innovative organisation has been working to encourage people to rediscover and reassert the character of their local area鈥攏ot least by championing plants that are characteristic of the area or have local cultural associations.
Akeroyd, too, longs for a kind of authenticity in the landscape. The trouble is, he says, 鈥渢rue authenticity requires the people and the culture that made the meadows鈥�, and that way of living no longer holds sway. But all is not lost. Thanks to initiatives like Common Ground and Flora Locale, new and sustainable relationships with the natural world are being forged. The Russian rowans languishing in that supermarket car park will relish the news.
Common Ground, Seven Dials Warehouse, Covent Garden, 44 Earlham Street, London WC2H 9LA. More information on Flora Locale鈥檚 web page: