Gold

Whoever is responsible for planting this fabulous display, in what has always been a rather dull patch of grassland on the low cliffs between Seaburn and Whitburn, near Sunderland, deserves to be congratulated. There is cornflowers, corn poppies, corn chamomile and corn marigold in the mixture but its the last of these that predominated in today's sunshine. 

The wild flowers have been sown in a broad strip around the field, leaving the grassy centre for the seabirds to roost and feed on at high tide. 

Just about everyone who walked past today stopped to take a photograph.

Corn marigold Chrysanthemum segetum, also known in some parts of the country as 'gold', was once a very common cornfield weed but has been eliminated from most agricultural land by the intensive use of herbicides. It does have a persistent seed bank in the soil because the seeds have a long viability period, and I have seen it grow naturally near Durham city in disturbed soil, long before it was a fashionable component of cornfield wild flower seed mixtures like the one that would have been used for this display.

The flower is an excellent source of pollen for late summer insects like hoverflies and when it's sown in the way that it's been used here it produces a stop-you-in- your-tracks display. Good for wildlife, good for people and, I suspect, a very economical way to produce a wonderful floral display at minimum cost to the local council taxpayer.

For a couple more examples of deliberately planted wild flower displays, click here and here.

Weeds or Wildflowers?

Every summer Durham University Botanic Garden hosts a wonderful display of annual cornfield weeds (or wild flowers, depending on your point of view). These are species that would have been familiar to Iron Age farmers but have now all but disappeared from the agricultural landscape, thanks to improved methods of cereal seed cleaning and decades of intensive use of systemic herbicides that wipe out weeds soon after germination and never allow them to set seed, so that the bank of seeds in the soil is finally depleted and the species become locally extinct. In Victorian times, when the main method of weed control was manual labour, all these species were serious weeds of crops that drastically reduced crop yields. The cornfield border is the most stunning exhibit in the Botanic Garden at this time of year, eclipsing even the giant Amazonian waterlilies in the glasshouses for their sheer ‘wow’ factor, and is a reminder of what has been lost from the agricultural landscape. Shown here, top to bottom, are corn poppies; corn marigold; cornflower; corn chamomile;corncockle. The whole border positively hums with bees and hoverflies. These are all easy species to grow in a wild flower garden. For more information about Durham University Botanic Garden visit http://www.dur.ac.uk/botanic.garden/