Section 4 – Nature Events In Popular Culture
There are many initiatives and traditions around the UK which are about nature or rely on it to happen. These are places and times where people do things which, if encountered by people who become politicians, would say, on the basis that ‘actions speak louder than words’, that “nature is important to voters”. But there are not enough, and some of those that exist, could do with help and promotion. Here are a few examples:
Tenbury Wells – UK’s Mistletoe Capital
An example of local identity and cultural reinvention around a nature-based business
Article from Shropshire Star
Every year for the last 160 years the small Worcestershire town of Tenbury Wells has hosted the Holly and Mistletoe auctions (this year 26th November and 3rd December).
On 20 October 2005 an unapposed Early Day Motion in the House of Commons congratulated Tenbury Wells Mistletoe Enterprise for ‘the foundation of a national mistletoe day on 1st December each year’. It had the support of eight Conservative, five Labour and four Liberal Democrat MPs and ‘wished the Enterprise well’ in continuing to maintain ‘the position of the area as the centre of the mistletoe trade’.
So although it was not a nature conservation proposition as such, it celebrated a cultural activity which would be impossible without nature. A bit of local Natural Capital, which those 17 MPs engaged with. Tenbury takes that as an endorsement by Parliament.
Tenbury lies close to the borders with Shropshire and Herefordshire. These counties, the Welsh Marches and the Severn Valley, are the UK centre of of Mistletoe, often growing on old trees in fruit orchards (but also Oak and a wide range of other trees). Mistletoe was chosen by Herefordshire as its regional flower by public nomination, in the 2002 Plantlife County Flowers project, which has it’s own Wikipedia page
Mistletoe has its own UK website run by Jonathan Briggs.
Prompted by fears the auctions would end when the livestock market site went up for sale, Jonathan and four friends invented National Mistletoe Day and an annual ceremony to crown a Mistletoe Queen, to publicise the local Mistletoe culture in 2004/5.
Tenbury Mistletoe Association was set up in 2010 to help run an annual arts festival on the closest Saturday to National Mistletoe Day, the 1st of December. With disarming frankness, its website states:
‘… the Town has been developing its identity as the UK’s Mistletoe Capital. This is unique and provides the Town with a branding that stands out amongst the rest’.
On the Saturday closest to 1st December, National Mistletoe Day, Tenbury on Wells holds a Mistletoe Festival and crowns the Queen.
Both Holly and Mistletoe have strong magical folklore associations, which is ultimately why we ‘bedeck the halls with boughs of Holly’, and kiss under the Mistletoe, at Midwinter and Christmas. Mistletoe is a semi-parasite, growing on tree bark and getting its minerals from trees but making its own sugars from green leaves. The Druids belived it powerful and its seeds are spread by berry-eating birds such as Mistle Thrushes, wiping their beaks on branches. Richard Mabey writes in Flora Britannica that in Medieval times it seemed:
‘… entirely magical – a plant without roots or obvious sources of food, that grew way above the earth and stayed green-leafed when other plants were bare. It seemed the supreme example of spontaneous generation and continuing life.
It is no wonder that it was credited with extraordinary powers … it was believed capable of breaking the death-like trances of epileptics, of dispelling tumours, divining treasure, keeping witches at bay, and protecting the crop of the trees on which it grew. And with its milk-white berries suggestively held between splayed leaves, it seemed ‘signed’ as a human potion and aphrodisiac too’.
Tenbury Mistletoe Association Facebook
Some local Mistletoe still appears at the Tenbury market alongside more that imported from France.
Plastic Mistletoe is now abundant in Supermarkets and ‘gift’ shops across Britain, appearing in Christmas decoration displays as early as late summer.
Mistletoe growing on a Willow tree full of thrushes, near Stroud – photo @Jamiewa50042387 on Twitter
Drummers, dancers and Druids frequent the Fesitival – here along the River Teme – photo Cheeky Monkey on facebook
Helping Toads Across Roads
An example of established volunteer-initiated and supported wildlife action
Road-kill is sadly the only way many people become aware of local wildlife such as Toads and Hedgehogs. Helping a Toad across the road has become a visible community activity for nature, with people using torches and buckest to help them cross and in some cases building tunnels fo Toads, at hundreds of places in the UK. In 1989 Tom Langton estimated there were 400 human-assisted road crossings in the UK, moving half a million Toads, Frogs or Newts. In 1995 71 Toad Patrols were found to have moved 20-40,000 Toads.
Toads are very committed to using Toad-traditional migrating routes to return to their ancestral ponds to breed each spring. (They are less dependent on wet conditions than frogs and will over-winter clustered in groups in dry spots such as under a log or stone, they also walk rather than hop). As a result an estimated 20 tonnes of Toads get squashed by UK road traffic every year [a large toad is 80g so that’s 250,000 animals].
Seeing this early spring carnage, at some point someone started helping Toads across roads, and it became a voluntary community activity, accompanied first by home made and then official County Council road signs.
In 1999 Nottingham wildlife Trust member Margaret Cooper successfully campaigned for a Toad season temporary road closure at Oxton – here in 2015.
In 2024 Margaret’s efforts to secure the now annual road closure at Beanford Lane, Oxton were recognized by the driver’s organisation, the AA
Signing roads and helping Toads makes nature visible to many more people but it also focuses close attention on changes in the the state of nature. As Margaret Cooper she told the BBC this year, when the Oxton road closure started, she estimated 1,000 toads would cross there every month but “Now it’s no more than 100 or two”. A 2016 study using national Toad crossing data found numbers had declined by two thirds since the 1980s. The reasons are being investigated but may include the direct and indirect effects of loss of habitats, and pesticides, as with Hedgehogs. Toads live up to a mile from their breeding ponds so numbers migrating are a bellwether for wider conditions affecting nature.
Froglife’s Toad Crossing Network map shows where crossings are manned and where they need more volunteers
Hedgehog Crossings
Ian Mansfield’s London Visits blog reported in September 2024 that Kingston Council had become the first council in the country to install official hedgehog crossing road signs.
‘Over the past four years, Kingston Council has collaborated with the London Hogwatch Team, deploying wildlife cameras that helped confirm that there is a hedgehog hotspot in Old Malden. As a result, four new road signs have been unveiled’. The cameras also picked up a Pine Marten.
Harleston Town’s Swift Culture
An example of a town deciding to make a nature moment celebration an annual event
Swifts migrate from Africa to the UK arriving at almost exactly the same time each year – where I live they usually appear in the first week of May, which was also the case back in 1923*. [* NNS Transcations 100 Years Ago, Bulletin of the Norfolk And Norwich Naturalists Society, May 2023, No. 161]
Knowing Swifts have been in steep decline and that one reason is traditional nest-holes being blocked up by building owners, a growing number of of people have put up tailor made Swift nest boxes and other nesting cavities, and then watch out for their return with anticipation. Some places people have gone a step further than this has become part of the local culture, such as Harleston in Suffolk where people started putting out ‘Welcome Back’ flags.
Harleston, Suffolk 2015 – from the Harleston’s Future Facebook page
Swifts mobile made by children in Harleston Church
Harleston 2017 with Swift Boxes
Petersfield – Nature In A Commuter Town
An example of a small town with multiple enagement actions for nature
Mention Petersfield in Hampshire to most English people and they probably think of a conservative small London-commuter town but I think it thinks of itself more as a market Town. And it’s also home to the Petersfield Climate Action Network, a community based NGO set up in 2020, which runs an almost bewildering variety of environmental and nature related projects. Most of its founders met through involvement with Extinction Rebellion, and over Covid, decided to focus on things practical and near to home.
PeCAN’s activities include supporting ‘No Mow May’ and campaigns to encourage more wildflowers in roadside verges, making the Petersfield area carbon neutral as quickly as possible, schools outreach and an eco-cafe, mapping energy needs and usage and helping develop new sustainable housing, a home retrofit advice service, free thermal imaging of homes in winter, a winter Tree Festival, toy and present swaps, a project supplying subsidised fruit trees and growing advice so as to increase the blossom for insects, a Swift nest box scheme, and advice on wildlife gardening.
PeCAN write about roadside verges:
to make longer verges more diverse in their plant species to the benefit of insects, the mowed cuttings (arisings) must be removed and taken away to compost elsewhere. This requires (a) investment in new (actually old!) machinery that cuts and collects, and (b) a repository composting site. Other local authorities nearby – Basingstoke & Deane, Dorset and Sussex – appear to manage this and are proud of their achievement, so why cannot authorities in Hampshire, one of the wealthiest parts of the country, step up to this relatively straightforward challenge?
In conjunction with the Town Council PeCAN runs a July eco Fair which this year attracted over 1500 people. Opened by the Town Crier and the Mayor, it included entertainment, photography and children’s writing competitions, and stalls covering travel (with bicycle repairs on offer, bikes for sale and EV owners to chat to), nature, energy and low waste living.
With support from East Hampshire District Council the Tree Council, and Network Rail volunteers (above) last winterPeCAN’s “A Fruit Tree In Every Garden’ project added 1,000 to the 950 it had already distributed, and planting for 2.7km of new hedging.
Over 120 Swift boxes have been put up in PeCAN’s Swift Streets project. One woman persuaded 28 other householders in her street to take part. PeCAN works on planning issues and engaging with local and regional decision makers including the District and Town Councils, South Downs National Park but is a truly street by street engagement operation.
One of its blogs reported: ‘In May one six year old put a chalk notice outside their house about the danger to nature of spraying the road with chemicals. Neighbour after neighbour asked him to do the same outside their houses. Our road was not sprayed. Well done, Chester!’
PeCAN encourages people to put up ready-made signs asking their Council not to spray street flowers, or weed the area outside their house by hand so it does not ‘need’ spraying. – Pesticide-free Petersfield Campaign
None of the PeCAN activities are remarkable in themselves but what is unusual is the density and variety of its mainly volunteer-driven work, and its very localised and public facing engagement.
In a town of 15,000 people and 39,000 including the surrounding “Petersphere” (as defined by local Shine Radio including villages), it directly engages 4 – 10% of the population, which is not bad for an organisation set up only four years ago.
The Golden Triangle of Wild Daffodils
An example of volunteer action to restore nature in danger of losing its cultural authenticity
The Wild Daffodils which inspired Wordsworth are now a rare sight. Community led conservation projects are attempting to return Wild Daffodil populations to their former glory in England’s ‘Golden Triangle’.
Wild Daffodils in Kempley SSSI daffodil meadow in Gloucestershire
‘Golden Triangle’ is the name given to the area around Newent, Dymcock and Ledbury on the borders of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.
‘in the 1930s, the Great Western Railway began running ‘Daffodil Specials’ from London, for the sake of weekend tourists who came to walk among the ‘golden-tides’ and to buy bunches at farm gates’ – Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica
The ‘Daffodil Line’ railway was closed in 1959 in the Beeching cuts but lives on as a community bus service which is a good way to get to see hosts of Wild Daffodils in the Golden Triangle. Kempley village holds a Daffodil Festival in March.
In his magnum opus of wild plant culture, Flora Britannica, Mabey explains that the native Wild Daffodil ‘is now a rare plant across great stretches of England and Wales, a flower that people make pilgrimages to see in a ‘host’. Yet in the late sixteenth century John Gerard regarded it as growing ‘almost everywhere’ in England and was ‘so well knowne to all that it needeth no description’’’.
In Germany the Wild Daffodil was the subject of a national ‘Flower of the Year’ awareness campaign for the protection of wildflowers in 1981. In the UK populations of Wild Daffodils now pale into insignificance compared to the tide of ornamental varieties planted (there are 26,000 varieties), including along roadsides. Hybridization with these usually much larger, gaudier, cultivated plants, threatens to wipe out the identity of the delicate ‘miniaturized’ Wild Daffodil. A single UK commercial grower produces 70m ornamental daffodils a year and non-wild daffodils grow in over 80% of UK gardens.
Some of the varieties of Daffodils but not the Wild Daffodil
Wild Daffodils are indicators of ancient woodland and old soils which escaped agricultural ‘improvement’. The hedgerows, Forest of Dean woods and meadows of the Golden Triangle which hold Wild Daffodils are also famous for numbers of rare orchids, Wild Service Trees, Lily of the Valley and Herb Paris. (Listen to a Richard Mabey radio programme about Wild Daffodils).
Wild Daffodils in the Forest of Dean – Dyfra
Chris Bligh and others in the community group Dyfra, Dymock Forest Rural Action have been working to protect, publicise and reinstate Wild Daffodils, and weed out threatening hybrids, since 1998. They write:
Until the 1950s, the wild daffodil grew here in great profusion. The annual harvest brought in seasonal workers to help locals cut huge swathes of daffodils which were then distributed by rail along the Daffodil Line … to the flower markets in Birmingham, Bristol and London. The wild daffodil no longer grows here so profusely due to its diminishing habitat, caused by the loss of ancient woodlands and orchards and changing agricultural practices, especially during and after the Second World War.
Dyfra volunteers remove hybrid Daffodils from Wild Daffodil populations still growing in Ancient Woodland.
In the 2010s Dyfra volunteers hand-removed 30,000 cultivated Daffodils which originated from planting in the 1960s, to exploit the Mother’s Day market.
Dyfra’s work has included Wild Daffodil seed collection with assistance of 75 ‘Seed Guardians’ in local parishes, creating a glade of 600 native trees in place of a former Christmas Tree plantation on the Centenary of the Forestry Commission, school arts projects, new Daffodil paths, a ‘Cultural Continuum’ exhibition with local poets and path-makers, Daffodil meadow management, making new habitat corridors to connect local woodland, and collecting acorns of native Sessile Oaks to grow on for new plantings.
Volunteers with Dyfra creating a native tree glade in place of a Christmas Tree plantation, Forest of Dean
Collection of native Sessile Oak acorns by Dyfra
Chris Bligh (right) and team of volunteers spreading native flower and tree seed
Loading acorns [above photos from Dyfra website]
Cultivated Daffodils growing on a bank in the Golden Triangle village of Dymock (see below) – many times the size of the native Wild Daffodils which gave the area its name.
In Dymock village, Dyfra volunteers have worked with a local landowner to remove cultivated Daffodils from a road bank, opposite the pub. Chris Bligh explains:
“We are replacing them with wild ones which have just survived in grassland on the other side of the 1850s vintage estate fence. The landowner has agreed to to allow a five metre buffer strip around the field under the fence – and plans a Sustainable Farming Incentive grass ley and a three-acre Conservation Orchard with the hope of a new Wild Daffodil field underneath the trees”.
Before work started in Dymock: the small Daffodils on the left side of the fence are the surviving natural Wild Daffodils – the large one on the right side are the cultivated ones.
Dymock community volunteers clearing a bank from which cultivated daffodils have been removed, so it can be replanted with Wild Daffodils.
Pots to grow on Wild Daffodils from seed (Dyfra says: ‘ unlike cultivated daffodils, the wild daffodils propagate from seed taking about 4 years to reach the flowering stage; they then flower again for another 2 or 3 years. It is therefore important not to cut the grass until the flowers have seeded and the seeds have matured – usually late June or early July’ .) [Above photos sequence – all Chris Bligh]
The Bugs Matter Survey
Example of an activity involving a cultural activity – driving – not fixed to place
Each year from May 1 to 30 September, the Kent Wildlife Trust and Buglife run a ‘Bugs Matter’ survey of insects, involving drivers. Driving is part of daily life for many people, and taking part can give drivers anywhere, a sense of agency about nature. Using their cars or vans they check on the abundance of flying insects, by inspecting the ‘splats’ on their number plates.
Originally launched by the RSPB in 2003 when 40,000 drvers took part, the RSPB Splatometer project it used paper ‘Splatometers’ on number plates. (See more here). It provides important data on the decline of insects.
The idea came to Phil Rothwell and other RSPB staff on a trip to see agrcultural areas in former Eastern europe after enlargement of the EU. As they drove East, they felt they were going back in time, as the car windscreen got more and more insects splatted on it.
This ‘folk memory’ resonated strongly with cyclists and drivers who remembered insect abundance from the 1960s. As that memory fades the project might face ‘shifting baseline’ challenges but it connects to driving culture, and could involve drivers organisations such as the AA, ETA or RAC. It could also help people detect any recovery in insects, if it happens, for example through Rewilding (optimism is of course motivational).
Fairyland Trust Events
A conservation group with an audience strategy based on entertainment culture
When we started the Fairyland Trust which uses plant and animal folklore, ‘making’ workshops, multiple learning styles and ‘magical days out’ to engage families with young children in nature, the existing cultural activity we targeted was not an attempt to engage people with ancient magical beliefs but engaging with the modern culture of a ‘family day out’. We embedded nature learning as a benefit and reward but it was promoted as a day-out, not a green day or environment fair. The “country fair” format is very old but also still socially recognizable as ‘normal’, hence the “Fairy Fairs”, begun in 2001.
Posters for the Fairy Fair and The Real Halloween in 2024
The motivational insight was that parents are desperate to entertain their 3 – 8 year olds at the weekend, and by 2001 many parents felt that there were only so many bouncy castles, plastic dinosaurs and traction engine rallies they could tolerate.
In the 1990s, we’d seen a growing fashion for Fairy Wings and things magical amongst festival goers, and then Harry Potter books were pubished from 1997 to 2007, so by 2001 witches, wizards and magic were ‘zeitgeist’ content. Our events were designed to have something for all motivational values groups but especially Prospectors, so there was entertainment, shopping, a magical pub and performers as well as nature workshops. We knew it was working when one dad said “you’ve invented an organic Disney” (as Disney said “first entertain”).
Graphic on plastic halloween costumes, shared online over a million times
To make the events as sustainable as possible we had started to eliminate plastic before 2010, when we added The Real Halloween (next one 26/7 October), as a more authentic nature-based counterpoint to the prevailing commercial shock and horror sugar fest model, with kids in polyester shop bought costumes. Parents/ carers are encouraged to assemble their own costumes instead, and we hold a no-new plastic Fancy Dress Show.
Waiting to join the Parade of Animal Lanterns at The Real Halloween
Fairyland Trust workshops are designed for young children, for whom there is no barrier between imagined and real, but in recent years we found that when we took them to festivals, they were also popular with ‘20 somethings’ (Gen Z and Y).
They wanted something enjoyable, social, displayable and ‘different’ to do (such as making and wearing a Wildflower Crown) before going out raving. As a generation, they were already primed to be interested in ‘nature’ but mostly ignorant about it.
Over COVID lockdown our daughters and their friends invented an engagement mechanism designed specifically for their contemporaries, which they tested online.
That started as an “about me” type quiz ‘which wildflower are you?’.
It proved popular so they reasoned that once lockdowns ended, a real-world 3D version might be even more popular at festivals. The result was the ‘Wild Flower Fortunes Caravan’.
The Wildflower Fortunes Caravan at Glastonbury Festival – the visitors are holding cards of their Wildflowers, divined by fortune telling. The moths shown on the two of 40 cards shown are the Flame Brocade Moth (foodplant, buttercup) and the Crimson Speckled Moth (foodplant Forgetmenot). From the Caravan’s Instagram page.
Festival goers who discovered their ‘spirit wildflowers’ at Boomtown festival (2024). Almost all visitors said they knew almost nothing about wildflowers (including what a wildflower was) before their visit. Afterwards many wanted to grow wildflowers at home.
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Apologies to all those also running popular culture events in which nature plays an essential role, which I’ve not mentioned – I’d be interested to hear about them, if you’d like to get in touch. chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk
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All sections
1 – Introduction And Nature Ability
2 – Missing The Garden Opportunity
3 – Signalling and Marking Moments
4 – Nature Events in Popular Culture
5 – Why Conservation Should Embrace Natural History
6 – Organising Strategy and Ways And Means
7 – Afterword: Aren’t We Doing This Already?
Contact: chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk