Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: United Kingdom, Australia launch new programs to conserve and restore roadside wildflowers

October 8, 2019

 

New programs promoting roadside wildflowers have been unveiled in Australia and the UK.

 

On September 27, NPCC partner organization Plantlife UK issued guidelines to help local communities manage roadsides to encourage native plants, wildflowers and the wildlife they support, largely by reducing mowing. If fully implemented, the guidelines would support 400 billion more roadside wildflowers and provide grassland habitat the “size of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff and Edinburgh combined”, according to the Guardian UK.

 

Supporters of the program note other benefits of restored native plant communities, “A great multitasker, nature on the road verge does a number of jobs like cleaning the air, storing carbon, pollinating crops and providing sustainable drainage,” said Clare Warburton, the principal green infrastructure adviser for Natural England, referring to some of the ecosystem services provided by native plant communities.

 

Reduced mowing will also cut road management costs for local communities.

 

A “wildflower friendliness rating scheme” has been developed in Western Australia. The program identifies, acknowledges and rewards local governments which are judged “wildflower friendly.”

 

The rating scheme will be verified by the Wildflower Society of Western Australia.

Local communities that achieve high ratings will have their [roadside] wildflowers promoted by Tourism WA during the 2020 wildflower season:

Tourism Minister Paul Papalia stated, “Wildflowers are an iconic Western Australian attraction that draw thousands of interstate and overseas visitors out to our regions each year.

In fact, [western Australia] has one of the largest collection of wildflowers on Earth with more than 12,000 species, 60 percent of which are found nowhere else on the planet.”

 

The United States has some similar programs:  A 2017 New Jersey law requires that native plants be used to landscape roadways. The Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Forest Service recently developed the Ecoregional Revegetation Application to guide the selection of locally adapted native plants for roadside revegetation.