Home Meadow

On entering the reserve through the gate you will see an interpretation sign to the left that is in the first of the three meadows, Home Meadow.
You may be able to make out a gap in the hedgerow which leads through to Back Meadow and the large orchard.
If you walk past the sign and continue to the left along the track you will eventually enter First Church Meadow.

At almost all times of the year you can expect to see mole activity within Home Meadow.
This gives you an opportunity to examine the soil type that makes up the meadows. It is officially described as "a sandy loam of the Boulder Clay Series" and is typical of the heavy soils of glacial origin that overly the central part of Suffolk known as "High Suffolk".

You can often spot small bits of chalk within the soil and when you try planting things such as tree saplings in it you realise just how heavy and sticky it is! It is quite possible that some local names such as the nearby "Honey Pot Cottage" may be making reference to the type and nature of the soil rather than to bee-keeping activities! However the upside of this type of soil is that it takes some time to dry out and the success rate of the establishment of tree saplings has been high.

Home Meadow is perhaps the least interesting of the three meadows as the number and range of plant species is much less than in the other two meadows. This is probably because chickens that were kept on this meadow in the past heavily enriched the soil. Their droppings would have allowed the grasses to grow at the expense of some of the flowering plants. Since the early 1980's the reserve has been managed for hay and the removal of the hay with the absence of any input of fertilizer has helped to bring down the high nutrient status. In fact we are starting to find that we need to put back a few nutrients as the grass yield is falling to non-commercial levels and we are finding two plant species in particular are increasing.

The first is Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor) which gets it's name from the rattling sound made when the wind blows the seed-heads when they have ripened with the dry seeds inside. This species is semi-parasitic on grasses and I have found it useful in my own garden where I have tried to create a meadow area from a part of my lawn - it does help restrict the growth of the grass and allow other plants to compete.

The other is Narrow-leaved Plantain or Ribwort Plantain (Plantago lanceolata) which is interesting in that it is used in pollen analysis as an indicator of when the earliest farmers in Neolithic times started to remove the old forest cover - it spread with the increase in the grasses used for pasture.







If you are walking towards First Church meadow you cannot fail to notice a magnificent English or Pedunculate Oak tree (Quercus ssp) on the left. The English Oak has stalked acorns and leaves with short stalks compared with the Durmast or Sessile Oak which has longer stalks on the leaves and stalkless acorns. This particular tree is a good example of a "stag's horn" oak that must be many hundreds of years old. It has a good proportion of old dead wood but this is quite natural in a tree of this age and very good for the other forms of wildlife that depend on it (somewhere in the region of 200 to 300 separate species of organisms are thought to be dependant on oak).

Oak is one of our "native" tree species. After the last ice age they were able to return northwards into Britain as conditions warmed up (along with much of the wildlife species depending on them) and were growing when Britain was finally cut off from the rest of Europe by rising melt water as the ice sheets disappeared.