Surrey Homes | SH33 | July 2017 | Interiors supplement inside

Jane Howard’s
Fables from the Farm
Jane is thrilled to see that her wildflower meadow is a blooming success at last
Summer has at last arrived. Everyone
who is going to give birth has
done so, the sheep and cattle
are all happily grazing outside and the
grass is not yet high enough to make
hay. So it’s a time of relative peace and
calm and our focus has turned to our
six- rather than four-legged friends.
I have written before about the flower
meadow we painstakingly planted two
years ago. Quite a performance, for first
we had to kill off five acres of grass – no
mean feat, three times we sprayed it and
twice it bounced straight back – and then
we had to rip up the
dead thatch to reveal bare
soil. Then we sowed a
typical Weald assortment
– including the now
quite rare Ragged Robin,
Yellow Rattle and Corn
Cockle – and while we
were thrilled when the
bare brown earth turned green, the first
year was mainly common annuals such
as poppies, daisies and cornflowers.
This year however, I am happy to
report, the meadow looks much more like
the meadow I imagined, a kaleidoscope
of delicate flowers against a backdrop of
green leaf and red sorrel. Lovely. Even
better news, while last year there was
a definite lack of insect life, this year
it is positively humming with a huge
variety of bees, beetles and butterflies.
This is great to see, as here at Coopers
Farm our thoughts are turning more
“There are more
than 2,500
different moths
native to the UK”
and more to encouraging pollinators.
And while we have five beehives in
another part of the farm, honey bees
account for a surprisingly small fraction
of pollination. Wild bees, and a huge
variety of bumbles, hoverflies, moths
and butterflies do most of the work!
To encourage butterflies we have been
busy cutting glades into a woodland
along a fence line where it meets the field.
Every few hundred metres, ideally near a
pussy willow if we can find one, we have
chopped down some trees and saplings to
make small clearings that are south facing
and open to the sky
but entered on an eastfacing
edge. It’s called a
scalloped margin. Once
the sun gets in it will
only take one season
for dormant seeds on
the woodland floor to
burst into life providing
a varied habitat. But our property
developments don’t stop there and we are
also making bee ‘hotels’ – oak logs drilled
with 5mm and 6mm holes for solitary
bees to crawl in, lay eggs and hibernate.
Needless to say, to achieve these
new habitats and to make sure our
endeavours are as des res as they can
possibly be we have had a lot of help
from Laurie, our local expert from the
charity Buglife. And very excitingly she
turned up one evening last week to carry
out our first nocturnal moth audit.
This is quite a palaver but, full of
anticipation of what we might find,
we filled our Thermos (and hip) flasks
and set off about nine o’clock into the
woods. The moth trap is rather like a
sawn-off dustbin, placed on a white
sheet, filled with egg boxes and topped
with a clear dome holding a bright
light bulb to draw in the moths.
And hey presto, along they came.
There are more than 2,500 different
moths native to the UK, so you can
appreciate the English names get
quite weird and wacky at times. The
Common Wave (as opposed to a royal
one?), the Puss moth, Triple Lines,
Carpets, there’s even a Tunbridge Wells
Gem out there, but not that night
in our Sussex fields. Some of them
have adorable fluffy faces like kittens,
others look like dead tough hockey
goalies. Some are plain like the Straw
Dots, while others were marvellously
patterned like the Marbled Carpet.
A whole new journey of discovery!
On the night, we trapped (and
released) more than 30 different
moths. Only 2,470 to go!
Follow Jane Howard – and the farm
– on Instagram @coopersfarm
Credit: FreeImages.com/Eva Schuster, Vincent Kilpatrick
wealdentimes.co.uk
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