School of Sustainability

Eleven years of doing almost nothing brought the orchids back

The field's last crop came off in 2005, and after that the tractors stopped. What followed, on a two-hectare corner of North Norfolk farmland, was close to nothing: no ploughing, no fertiliser, no commercial seed mix scattered across the soil. The one management that continued was a traditional annual hay cut, taken year after year as it had been before. Everything else the field did on its own, while a team from UCL Geography came back each year to keep count.

Researchers led by Professor Carl Sayer watched what happened next, year by year, from 2011 to 2022. The plant life changed slowly and then noticeably. Within ten to fifteen years of the farming ending, the old arable field had become a species-rich wildflower meadow. Among the plants that turned up on their own were southern marsh orchid - appearing in the thousands - plus greater tussock-sedge, yellow rattle and common centaury, several of them locally rare.

The finding, published in Restoration Ecology, pokes at a settled assumption in habitat restoration: that making a species-rich grassland requires bought seed mixes and costly intervention. Here, none of that happened. The plants that arrived did so through natural processes, and because of that they carry the genetics of the local area - stock already fitted to that soil and that weather, rather than something grown elsewhere and shipped in.

What the field needed, it turns out, was not more inputs but fewer of them, plus a single cut a year and enough time. Eleven years of it, in this case, before anyone could stand in the meadow and count orchids in the thousands. That is the awkward lesson the researchers draw: the natural recovery did not merely match the expensive alternative, it preserved something money cannot buy back once gone - the genetic diversity of plants already adapted to that particular place.

Regeneration International · Read the source