Knepp Wildland Foundation column: Encountering natural beauty in the mundane

It’s the kind of beautiful early summer day where you’d much rather not be commuting and instead be somewhere far away from the trudgery of traffic jams and tarmac. You’ve just come to a stop at traffic lights when a butterfly flutters across the bonnet of your car and draws your eye to follow its flight path. It’s a marbled white, chequered black and white like a miniature flying chess board.

It heads purposefully towards the verge on the other side of the road which is awash with the purples, whites and yellows of assorted wildflowers and, you notice, teeming with other butterflies and flying insects. You’re momentarily free from the frustration of the commute and feel enlivened by encountering such natural beauty somewhere so mundane. Now imagine that that roadside meadow didn’t exist.

Suppose it had been mown to a brown mulched mess a day or two before or, worse, concreted over and done away with altogether. Where would the butterflies and bees go? And where would that sense of wonder have gone? In the increasingly nature-depleted landscapes of the UK we have been so deprived of such unexpected natural beauty to the point where many of us no longer realise what we have lost. It takes surprise encounters such as this to remind us how much better things could be. Thankfully there are signs that things are slowly beginning to improve.

Road verges cover 1.2 per cent of the land in Great Britain. Put end to end they would stretch several hundred-thousand kilometres and cumulatively make up an area bigger than the Lake District National Park. According to the charity Plantlife, these roadside corridors are home to more than 700 plant species – 45 per cent of all our native flora. Sadly, many are mismanaged by local authorities; mown too often or before flowers set seed, to satisfy a desire for neatness.

This, of course, all costs a lot of money. Luckily, Plantlife has produced its excellent Good Verge Guide to encourage and educate councils in the best (and more cost-effective) ways to manage verges which, if implemented, would lead to around 400billion extra flowers gracing our roadsides each year. A more colourful and wildlife-rich road network would be a wonderful thing, in terms of nature recovery but also for our own wellbeing. Many studies have shown that access to nature in public spaces can help improve our mood and even reduce anti-social behaviour.

West Sussex County Council recently announced the designation of its latest Notable Road Verge beside the A280 near Worthing. This site joins 84 others which cumulatively cover an area the size of 293 football pitches. Of the latest addition, Knepp’s own resident butterfly expert guide Neil Hulme said: “Road verges don’t come better than this. It was like walking across a mini nature reserve, which is what many verges have the potential to be, forming vital ‘green corridors’ across the landscape. The results of my butterfly surveys here are spectacular, as is the flora, which includes beauties such as the bee orchid. My count of 424 butterflies included 20 species, the highlights being 107 small blue, which is quite rare and very localised in distribution, 222 common blue and 21 brown argus. Mating pairs of these three species were seen and many other females were observed laying eggs on plants which would be removed if cut too early in the year.”

So, if you know a verge near you that is teeming with such floral and invertebrate life, take action to save it! Or, if there isn’t, think about taking action to improve a verge near you.

For more information, and to sign Plantlife’s open letter to your council, visit plantlife.love-wildflowers.org.uk/roadvergecampaign.