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Eynsham's Nature Recovery Network! News

Join NRN for Wildflower Planting! 5 Nov 2021 Join us for planting rare wildflowers in the Carnival Meadow - Playing Fields, Sunday 14th November

Over the summer, NRN’s wildflower group and Long Mead’s care-farming participants have collected, sown and nurtured some of the rarest plants from Long Mead’s 1000 year old meadow. Now they are ready to plant out in the Carnival Meadow.

Come and help us make the Playing Fields a thing of beauty and utility for Eynsham. All these plants are perennials - a few, like great burnet, can live for 150 years and they are all very deep rooted, some reaching down almost 3 metres into the soil, making them perfect for sequestering carbon. Research being carried out on Long Mead by our partners at the Open University shows that floodplain meadows store carbon more effectively and securely than trees.

We will also be planting 100 cowslips sponsored by the Eynsham Society who bought plugs in spring that have been nurtured on Long Mead through the summer. Long Mead’s own cowslips are clinging on on the edge of the meadow with not enough seed to propagate.

For those who are new to the NRN, the Parish Council and Playing Fields Committee supported the request to restore 1.6 acres of the playing fields at part of the Nature Recovery Network, in summer 2020. Fresh hay filled with Long Mead's 120 species of wildflower seed was spread on the playing fields. But some of the slower growing species often struggle to establish which is why we have grown the rare ones by hand. Last autumn dozens of NRNers turned out to plant snakeshead fritillary bulbs.

Let’s do it again!

Please register on the NRN website.

NRN's meadow creation project has been supported by Trust for Oxfordshire's Environment, Natural England Long Mead, Eynsham Parish Council, County Council Priority Fund (Charles Mathew).

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