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Working from right to left, I crouch down and use a sickle to hack through the tall grasses. Their pale seedheads scatter, filling the air with nose-tickling dust. There are two wide bands of meadow either side of a mown path, a lengthy job to cut this way. I prefer it over a strimmer for fear of harming a slow worm or a resting hedgehog.
The fields of the North Pennines were cut for hay a while ago, but these grassy strips hold late-flowering plants – knapweed, scabious, betony – with nectar for bumblebees and butterflies. Once part of a lawn, their growth has been gradually lowered with hay rattle, a semi-parasitic plant with lemon-yellow flowers. All that was needed to start the rattle’s work was a handful of seeds collected from a local meadow and scattered into bare patches of soil in August.
Each year I have plucked the papery heads, their cargo of flaked almond-like seeds shaking inside, to further distribute them. Where hay rattle has stemmed the vigour of grasses, wildflowers are benefiting; one of many farming names for this plant was “poverty”.
My garden meadow is gradually becoming an echo of the upland hay fields with the purple-blue of wood cranesbill, the antiseptic smell of yarrow and sneezewort and the spring yellow of buttercup.
The sickle reveals what has been going on underneath it all; the snaking runs made by the little feet of voles, a mouse’s nest soft as down from chewed-up grass leaves. A slimy glaucous mushroom hidden among moss and debris is a verdigris agaric. A matt black dropping shows a hedgehog has wandered here.
As I rake off the grass, patches of bare earth are revealed. Into these I empty the pods of common spotted orchids, their seed as fine as spores. It will be some years before they grow to flower. Meanwhile I shall run the mower over the meadow until winter, collecting the clippings, while the rattle seed lies waiting for next spring.
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