The Meadow Maker

Yesterday, I visited the community orchard I maintain in Plymouth's Central Park. One of my previous posts describes it in some detail. While there, it was the orchard's understory rather than trees that caught my attention. Let me rewind a bit to explain. 

Last summer, I stumbled across a patch of yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor), on the far side of Central Park from the orchard. They are lovely flowers. I always think they look like a choir of singing parrots pointing their yellow beaks to the heavens. I returned to the spot later in the season to collect some of the dried seed heads. By the way, the species gets its name from the fact its seeds literally rattle inside these heads.

I collected the seeds to spread in the orchard, which is exactly what I did. I seeded them into a little patch by cutting the grass short and raking in the seeds to ensure they made good contact with the soil. 

I went to all this effort because yellow rattle has the alternate name of meadow maker, which is exactly what it does. It reduces the vigour of grasses allowing beautiful meadow wildflowers to establish themselves. Yellow rattle achieves this by attaching to grass roots and parasitising them, poaching valuable nutrients. This causes the grass to grow less vigorously, up to 60% less vigorously.

In our community orchard, we would so appreciate not only more flowers dancing in the sunshine humming with pollinators, but also less grass. The young fruit trees are on dwarfing rootstocks with shallow root systems. Due to this, they struggle to compete with grass.

This is why the little patch of ground I so carefully seeded last autumn caught my attention yesterday. The yellow rattle is in full bloom and the grass, as so dearly hoped, is growing notably shorter. This left me buzzing for hours. I got home, and my other half asked what had gotten into me. Flowers! I replied. Glorious flowers!