Hitchin Cemetery April - May 2023

The cool weather in spring has meant that flowering plants have been slow to get going this year, but the damp conditions have made for some lush growing conditions. The star plant of the cemetery is Meadow Saxifrage, this delicate little white flower is a native plant that is a species of old grassland and these days can only be found in a few old churchyards and damp hay meadows. This year has been its best ever year in the cemetery with over 500 plants! The left hand photo shows a little orange-topped cane next to an outlying clump to help the mowing team work around it as it spreads around the cemetery but the biggest patch (right hand photo) is just by the gates on St John's Road. 

I just want to bang on a little more about Meadow Saxifrage as it is a super plant and indicates the importance of the cemetery as a wildlife refuge in Hitchin. North Herts Council own & maintain the cemetery (using subcontractors and a little help from the Friends group) and we all follow a Greenspace Action Plan produced by the Countryside Management Service. It is no easy feat to balance the needs of cemetery users with some people preferring a short-mown and tidy look and others are happier with a more relaxed regime. So the cemetery has a mix of "amenity" and "conservation" (short & long grass) areas, which together with majestic trees and interesting borders means that there hopefully is something to satisfy everyone.

One of the lovely plants, looking good all year round, and very good for wildlife are the Silver Birches and there are many in the cemetery. The close-up photo shows three catkins:  one small upward point female catkin and two larger male catkins. You can just make out some aphids under a leaf too & these will be providing food for Ladybirds, Shieldbugs, Blue & Great Tits. 

 

A little plant that was only just discovered in the cemetery is Toothed Medick, a member of the Clover family and its seed-heads have rather odd anti-clockwise spirals with spines. This plant is native to Britain but is an introduction to Hertfordshire and most likely to have been brought in with soil fertilizer made from "shoddy", a waste product resulting from processing sheep's wool which would have arrived by rail from Yorkshire . This is not the only plant to have been brought in like this, Musk Stork's-bill grows as a pavement plant in hedge bottoms along St John's Road. The existence of both these plants, very unusual in Hertfordshire, suggest that maybe the cemetery land was at some time improved, maybe to aid tree or shrub planting. 

A less happy event over the winter has been the loss of a Mimosa tree, native to Australia and not fully hardy: it succumbed to last winter's heavy frosts. The picture on the left shows its yellow flowers in February 2022 attractive to early flying bees, and on the right from April this year, with its brown foliage. 

However, one plant looking terrific at the moment, and of great interest to bees, including the magnificently named Hairy-footed Flower Bees, is the purple-flowered Cerinthe (aka Honeywort). This border is an example of the work of the Cemetery Friends group who work hard providing colourful displays (I think it was Alison in particular who was responsible for this show). On the wall behind can just be seen a green box which is Bee hotel, and the close-up photo shows it is proving very popular with many holes being used by various bee species. 

 

Some other bits of Friends work you might notice are a number of graves covered with cones which are used to hide ugly broken concrete where adding plants is not a practical option. In the example shown below there is a stand of Garlic Mustard to one side, the food plant for Orange Tip butterflies: the photo shows a female (which lacks the male's orange colour) photographed nearby. 

As well as litter picking and gardening the Friends group also do the odd bit of cleaning & the before & after shots below show the signs are looking a bit better now.

During May we held the first of this year's cemetery tours with a great turn-out of 26 people. There are three more (free) tours this year, each lasting about an hour:

• Friday 9th June 11:00am (no booking necessary)
• Sunday 23rd July (book through Hitchin Festival https://www.hitchinfestival.co.uk/whatson)
• Sunday 30th July (book through Hitchin Festival https://www.hitchinfestival.co.uk/whatson)

One member of the Friends of Hitchin Cemetery group is John Edwards who is choirmaster of Hitchin's Jubilate Choir and in May put on a concert entitled 'Only a Little Planet' at The Woodside Hall, a programme of music and poetry dedicated to the beauty of the natural world. The concert was very well received and various local wildlife groups put on displays at the concert and Hilary & Margaret from the Friends group were there to talk about the Cemetery and hand cemetery leaflets. There will also be an opportunity to meet members of the cemetery Friends group when we take a stall at Hitchin History day (organised by the Hitchin Historical Society) on Saturday 15th July in Church House: see you there!