On Sunday, we had the first CMG members’ meadow visit this year – at a smallholding near Llandeilo. The weather was mixed but we managed to avoid the heavy rain while out in the fields seeing what was appearing in late spring in the meadows.  Fortunately, in case there was heavy rain, we also had a display under cover about CMG’s project which is now UK wide – the Big Meadow Search (BMS).

Don’t forget that the BMS season starts in only a couple of weeks.  It runs every year from the beginning of June to the end of August.  Anybody can take part, you don’t have to be an expert botanist, you can just record what you can recognise and identify.  It’s not only for hay meadows, any grassland is suitable for the project, such as road verges, churchyards, recreation grounds, orchards, woodland rides, golf course “rough”, riverbanks, sea cliffs.  Just record how long you have spent looking, roughly what area you’ve looked in (e.g. less than a tennis court, between tennis court and football pitch, bigger than football pitch) and a grid reference and name of the location. 

Once you get used to looking more closely at what you’re walking through, you also know better where in the field guide to look things up, and your plant ID skills will improve. It’s a painless way to get some practical experience of plant identification, and it also generates thousands of valuable new records. So do please give it a go this year. You can read all about it at the BMS website:

https://bigmeadowsearch.co.uk

where you can also enter all your results.