Bringing a touch of summer to a Salisbury street corner

As seen in the Salisbury Journal on 10/04/2024.

In a bid to cheer up a neglected street corner, Salisbury resident Michael Stroud teamed up with his step-daughter, award-winning illustrator and meadow ecologist Vicky Bowskill, to install an eye-catching meadow mural in this disused shop window. This kind of educational artwork is the ideal use for empty shop windows, helping to deter vandalism and add to the cultural value of Salisbury.

The mural depicts a species-rich floodplain meadow, including both the colourful aboveground meadow flowers you might see in June, and the hidden riches of their deep roots. Floodplain meadows are highly biodiverse. They can support as many as 40 plant species in each square metre, along with all the insects, birds, mammals, fungi and other life that depends on those plants for food and habitat.

All plant species have different rooting habits and some of these can grow as deep as 2 metres in permanent grasslands. You can see from this mural how having so many different plants living close together means that their roots can fill up the soil profile. These roots support soil life and build a healthy soil structure that can help to prevent urban flooding and improve water quality in our rivers. By exchanging nutrients with soil organisms, these roots also lock up large carbon stores deep in the soil. Species-rich grassland like these may actually store more carbon that almost any other habitat type, apart form peatlands.

These heritage hay meadows have been a valued part of our agricultural landscape for a thousand years. Their high botanical diversity is created by managing the flow of soil nutrients, so annual haymaking is essential to ensuring they remain a part of our landscape.

So next time you admire a summer meadow in full flower, remember how much of the action is actually happening belowground. You can view this mural on Estcourt Road or glimpse it from the parallel section of the A36 next time you are passing.