On the verge of perfection

Roads might be destroyers of 'natural' habitats, but next to them wild flowers are being sown and meadows created. Something revolutionary is happening to our highways

In the village that I grew up in, there was a man - Mark Cripps - who was a road man. He did two things. He kept the ditches clear that drained the water off the roads, and he cut the verges when they became overgrown.

For the former, he used a shovel, and the latter, what he called a hook but perhaps you might call a sickle. Oh, and he had a short stick with a bit jutting off it with which he gathered the grass towards him as he cut, and which also stopped the blade slicing through the grass and into his leg.

I suppose he covered a piece of road about three miles long. He drank cold tea from a bottle with a cork in it and strapped his shovel to the crossbar of his bike. The blade of his hook was always wrapped in a dirty cloth. He grew carrots and cabbages in his back garden, and on a nice, sunny Sunday afternoon you would see him sitting in front of his house on a hard kitchen chair with his jacket off.

Long, long dead of course, as is Nellie, his wife, and my friend. I used to go and see her every day after my breakfast, hours after Mark had swayed off on his bike to his road. I would talk and she would gently move around the dark kitchen preparing Mark's dinner, carefully saving the butter wrapping to use for wiping baking tins. There was no excess in their lives - nothing at all to spare - and I was a bumptious, privileged child, yet they treated me with unvarying generosity and kindness.

The point about Mark's job was that he knew the roads as well as he knew his own garden. He knew every flower and every vole hole in the bank. He cut back the verges after the cow parsley and cowslips flowered, and never let the fat hen or docks seed. His hook measured and protected as much as it ever 'tidied'.

I now live in as lovely and unspoilt a part of England as any, but the lanes are cut by a man on a tractor with a flail. I dread their crawling vandalism. This indiscriminately smashes all growth supposedly to make the roads safer for motorists. A driver in a large tractor, earmuffs on, has no connection to what he is cutting, only to the machine that he is operating.

Yet if you drive down a modern motorway or trunk road, things change. You will see that the verges are managed as carefully as any public space. Grasses are of different types and cut at different heights, wild flowers appear at different seasons, according to the soil and local environment, and trees on all major roads are planted carefully and sympathetically. Clearly this is not just the local authorities or road builders superficially tarting up the roadside like builders making good a housing estate. Something is going on.

This is really important, because there are huge areas to be considered - nearly 4,500 acres of motorway verges alone, as well as all the bypasses and major 'A' roads. They represent the most common contact that many people have with the countryside, as well as a very particular habitat for flora and fauna.

Because humans have such limited access to these areas, all kinds of wildlife can adapt to a pretty protected habitat. Not to use these thousands of acres for environmental, educational and aesthetic purposes is a crass waste of opportunity in this desperately overcrowded island, where the vast majority of our farmland is abused by irresponsible agribusiness that thinks no further than its own short-term profit. Sympathetically and intelligently managed countryside is become a rapidly diminishing commodity. Every square metre counts. This is a case where the countryside belongs to the tax-paying driver. That's you and that's me.

So I called Mike Fargher, the Senior Environmentalist Specialist at the Highways Agency, to see just what is being done to our verges. He told me that work on grasses and wild flowers is a fairly recent development, but one which is now being done on a large scale. Wild flowers are being sown and established, with particular attention to the insect life that this brings in its wake. Just as small mammals, and therefore kestrels, thrive in the rougher grass verges by motorways, so butterflies love the areas where wild flowers grow.

I have seen the official government wild-flower handbook, which gives guidance on 'the selection, sowing and planting of wild flowers for highways', and despite its arid prose, it is impressive. There is no doubt that our major roads are becoming some of the most interesting and best-managed conservation areas.

Fargher was positively evangelical about the work that is being done, particularly two controversial projects: the Twyford Down M3 improvement and the Newbury bypass. It is easy to cast the road builders and all who are party to the projects as baddies, but an awful lot of good and interesting environmental work has, and is, going on at both sites.

At Twyford Down, where the road gouges through chalk downland, large areas that were intensive farmland have now been recreated as downland meadow and wetland. As with all areas that are to support a diverse range of wild flowers, the soil is first 'denutrified', so the flowers will not be swamped by grasses and weeds. This means carefully stripping the topsoil to provide just enough - but no more - nourishment.

Five hundred square metres of turf that was rich in horseshoe vetch, which the Chalkhill Blue butterfly feeds on, and which would have been bulldozed for the road, were lifted and stored, and 3,000 square metres of huge 'macroturfs' 2.4m by 1.2m and 30cm thick bought in. This technique, developed in Alaska, eliminates drought and frost damage and means deep-rooted plants such as orchids - as well as burrowing invertebrates - all survive the move.

If, as a motorist, you saw this going on as you whizzed by, it would look more like despoliation, as huge, unwieldy machines manoeuvred the turfs into place. You would hate them for about five seconds and whiz on. But the machines are specially developed to do minimal damage to the soil structure and are probably less harmful than teams of people working by hand.

Areas which were not turfed were sown with three different types of grass-seed mix for ground that would be managed at different grass lengths. Thirty-one thousand plants of kidney vetch, horseshoe vetch, rockrose, thyme, clustered bellflower, cowslip and hairy violet were planted - all grown from locally collected seeds or cuttings. Sixteen acres were sown with 260kg of seed, either collected or bought locally.

One hundred thousand plug plants of eight species, which were important butterfly food, were planted, all grown from local cuttings or seed. Incidentally, plugs are a very good way of introducing wild flowers to an area of grassland in the garden. Commercially, this is often done by spraying the turf with glysophate and planting into the dead turf, but do not give Monsanto any money by using their glysophate - better to strip the turf and plant into the subsoil.

I had not known that an area of flood meadow destroyed by the new road was moved to a new site 16 miles away, an island on the River Test near Stockbridge, which was hydrologically similar but had become species-reduced by modern agriculture. How desirable this kind of relocation is seems debatable to me - it is the thin end of the wedge of a 'naturalised' theme park - but at least it was not grubbed up and destroyed as so many road sites.

I don't want to sound like a government apologist for the Twyford Down road - which should have been a tunnel - but what strikes me about this work is that it is more than window-dressing. You will hardly see it from the car. It won't win votes. It is being done because it is the best thing to do under the circumstances. Mark Cripps, for all his intimacy with the roadsides he tended, did not care for them any better, and his approach is utterly unsustainable on major roads. The reality is a vast acreage of sophisticated, unintuitive roadscape.

But there is a real understanding of the potential of motorway and trunk-road verges as wildlife corridors where flora and fauna can exist in a narrow strip bounded by tarmac on one side and the almost equally hostile environment of modern farmland on the other. It seems an appropriate metaphor for the dog-end of this tired century: an increasingly turgid and route-bound stream of traffic howling past sensitively created and managed wild-flower verges. Oh brave new world!