Treasuring our Floodplain Meadows
Author(s): Olivia Nelson
04/07/2025Happy National Meadows Day! Begun 10 years ago in 2015 the first Saturday in July is a celebration of meadows - intended to raise awareness and appreciation of the UK’s species-rich grassland.
Hosted by the Open University, the Floodplain Meadow Partnerships's mission is to address the urgent need to promote and conserve Britain's floodplain meadows. In 2024 we worked with the National Trust to win one of The Open University’s Open Societal Challenges Challenge Us! funding awards: "Tools to Realise Socio-Economic Benefits from Floodplains Under Restoration" (TREASURE).
The project’s aim is to understand the potential for floodplain meadows within the National Trust’s land holdings, and to raise awareness inside the National Trust as well as with its visitors and members. We currently have two OU paid interns working on the project gaining valuable experience by working alongside OU academics and NT staff. One of the interns is spending 6 weeks carrying out botanical surveys of potential meadow restoration sites on National Trust properties, whilst the other is exploring our collections catalogue to find art and objects associated with meadow wildlife and management traditions. We hope to be able to link the history of National Trust places to our future nature recovery work through these objects. The links between land management, nature and cultural history are completely intertwined, but are not always evident and it is now time to bring them more to the fore.
Our collections work is going to focus around objects related to the National Trust's Attingham Park where there is already floodplain meadow restoration being carried out and some interesting objects in the collections relating to floodplain meadows. Our intern will also be scouring the National Trust database across the country to see what else can be found. One of the project outputs will be a video showing relevant objects, the meadows and the National Trust staff involved in the work. This will be hosted at Attingham for visitors to enjoy. We hope this sparks similar interest in other properties across the National Trust estate.
Our survey programme is aiming to visit at least 18 National Trust properties looking at both existing floodplain meadows and sites with potential for restoration, starting off in Norfolk. We have also provided training for National Trust staff sharing our learning and research on the management and restoration of floodplain meadows.
We believe that over 99% of floodplain meadows have been lost over the last century. By restoring some of our floodplain meadows we are working with the National Trust to help reverse this trend. We’ll be sharing more as the project progresses.
Summer intern David (right), discovering that grass ID isn't impossible (and he needs new boots).