The 3^rd National Meadows Conference was held on Thursday and Friday last week.  Like the first two conferences, it was organised by the Middle Marches Community Land Trust, and this year it was hosted by the Kew Wakehurst site in Sussex.  The first Conference was held in Shropshire, the second near Bath.

CMG has been represented at all three of these conferences, and although it was a long way to travel, two members of our Steering Group attended this year’s.  We had displays about the group, and also about the Big Meadow Search (BMS) project, now in its 5^th year:

There were over 100 attendees from all over the UK, and a full programme of talks on Friday:

One of the talks was about the BMS project, by Laura Moss from our steering group.  We had a lot of people queuing up to buy the BMS books, and succeeded in making the project more widely known in eastern England.

On the Saturday there were trips to look at some of the meadows at the Wakehurst site, and demonstrations of many techniques for species enrichment of grassland, including a seed harvester:

Our CMG and BMS boards were still on display on the Saturday, and several people who had bought the books the previous day came to find us to say how impressed they were with them.  Given that BMS is an unfunded project, and CMG is a volunteer run organisation, this was very gratifying.

We still have books available, so get in touch if you are interested on bigmeadowsearch@gmail.com Book 1 focuses on grassland indicator plants with a selection of their associated species and Book 2 has 200+ additional plant species, again with associated species.