Back Meadow

This meadow has a good variety of plant species such as Green-winged Orchid, Cowslip etc but is not as rich and diverse as First Church Meadow.

To the northeast is the large orchard which contains a number of mature fruit trees of different varieties including apple, pear, plum and walnut. In the hurricane of 1987 some of these trees were brought down and since then we have been trying to re-establish some of the varieties that were previously present and also include some other fruit varieties especially those that have specific connections with Suffolk and East Anglia such as "Clopton Red", "St Edmund's Russett" and "Lord Henniker" .

We have also been working around the meadow itself and have been restoring the hedgerows by a combination of planting saplings where there were gaps and increasing the thickness of the hedges with a combination of hedge laying and coppicing.



In the 1970s Dr Max Hooper proposed a method of dating hedges which in it's simplest form involved measuring a 30 yard length of hedge and counting the number of woody species (but not including the shrubby undergrowth e.g. bramble or woody climbers e.g. ivy). This number is then multiplied by 100 to give an approximate age of the hedge. So for a count of 5 species within the 30 yards the hedge would be 5 X 100 or 500 years old
This "Hooper's Rule" is obviously open to exceptions and many landscape archaeologists are sceptical of it's value. However as there is quite a lot of documentary evidence on the dates of the hedgerows then it might be quite a fun thing to try - however be aware that we have restored quite a proportion of the hedges in all areas of the reserve so a "1000 year old hedge" may have been planted up just 10 years ago!

	The species in the hedges include Hawthorn, Blackthorn, Field Maple, Dogwood, Elm, Ash, Oak, etc. Two common hedging species are the Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) and Hawthorn (Crataegus ssps) The Blackthorn is one of our earliest flowering shrubs with the flowers appearing before the leaves. It is quick to sucker into new areas and some of the hedges in Back Meadow contain a large component of this species. In Autumn the plant produces sloes and this plant is probably the ancestor (or one of them at least) of most cultivated plum varieties.
Blackthorn flowers		Common Hawthorn flowers

	There are two main types of Hawthorn - the Common Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) with just one stony pip or carpel and the Midland Hawthorn (Crataegus laevigata) with just the one carpel and with less divideed leaves. Both are present on the reserve. . Hawthorn is often known as quickthorn (for the speed of its growth so it was used a lot in establishing hedges, especially during the Enclosure period) and May (for the time it flowers) and it has a huge folklore surrounding it.
Blackthorn fruits - sloes		Hawthorn fruits - haws

David Martin, a previous owner of Rookery farm, once pointed out a distinct flat area just in font of most southeasterly hedge toward its western end. He said that his family believed it to be the foundation of some building or other. I have checked the old maps and can find no indication of any building although the Fuller map of 1656 does shows a gateway in this area which may explain the feature.

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