Maisie’s Meadow & Jazz’s Orchard

There is a small triangular field near near the Three Moorhens pub, Hitchin which is a happy place for me as I like to search the area for signs of mini-beast activity. I'm sure the field looks unprepossessing to most people, bordered by a noisy road but is a 1.5 acre patch on the edge of Hitchin which has proved a good place for me to learn about butterflies, bees, etc. 

The field is associated with Hitchin Priory hotel, but is cut off from their grounds by a footpath and bounded by roads on the other two sides, thus the land appears to have no commercial value and has been neglected.  

The site is light soil with a line of mature trees to the east (mostly Common Limes and Horse Chestnut), a line of scrub to the north including Hawthorn and Dogwood, and open and very sandy to the south, making it a sunny site. There is an informal east-west footpath used by many a dog-walker which divides the site into two. In 2018 a neighbour, with permission from the hotel, organised that the southern "Jazz's Orchard" was planted with fruit trees and the northern “Maisie’s Meadow” area was rotavated, rolled and sown with wildflower mix to replace long grass, molehills and ant hills. 2019 saw the meadow with much Yellow Rattle, an important plant for establishing a good meadow which helps stop grass dominating and this worked in as 2020 Ox Eye Daisy was spectacularly dominant!

Ox-Eye Daisies, 2020

The meadow is cut in autumn and the cuttings put to one side, again this is important for a good meadow as it keeps soil fertility low and lets the rarer flowers grow. “Jazz’s Orchard” has been planted with 70 fruit trees, Maisie and Jazz being two fondly remembered dogs. The orchard includes various eating and cooking Apples, Plums,  Cherries, Damsons, Pears, Walnut and Figs. Two of the apple trees are Hitchin Pippins, a rare local apple saved from the brink by Mike Clarke, warden of Tewin Orchard.

The whole area attracts a large variety of insects from the spring when hundreds of Buff Tailed Bumblebees are attracted by large quantities of Ground Ivy in the southern area, through to September Ivy Bees when can be seen searching the sandy ground for nesting sites. The quantity of Ivy Bees is staggering: difficult to estimate numbers but I would say tens of thousands. This bee species was new to science in 1993 and first spotted in the UK in 2001 and now thrives in massive numbers. This is a dramatic example of population shift, but I learnt that such dynamic changes in the UK are not that unusual, climate warming means many continental insect species are hopping the channel and then radiating outwards from Kent.

Here are just a few of the insects and flowers which can be found from spring to autumn from the Meadow & Orchard... 

 

Buff Tailed Bumblebee and Bee Orchid

 

Common Green Shieldbug and Green Bottle

 Hoverflies

Red Headed Cardinal Beetle and Wasp Beetle

 
Viper's Bugloss and Two Spot Ladybird

The site has one or two rarities to offer: the once common Two Spot Ladybird is not seen often in Hertfordshire; the site's light soil attracts Sand-Tailed Digger wasps, and rarest of all is the nationally scarce  Long Winged Sap Hoverfly which lives off the weeping sap from Horse Chestnut trees.

Long Winged Sap Hoverfly 

In winter you might hear Nuthatches or see Green Woodpeckers on the ground or Greater Spotted Woodpeckers in the trees, or just enjoy the sunset.

Winter Sunset looking towards Charlton

Maisie's Meadow and Jazz's orchard have much more to see in them than you might think and it will be interesting to see how the meadow and orchard develop, and lets hope the area remains commercially undeveloped!