The Urban Meadow at National Museum Cardiff is a little haven for pollinators in the city centre. On a summer’s day it is teeming with bees, hoverflies, grasshoppers, ladybirds and craneflies. 

Monitoring the meadow, and managing it for wildlife, is vital to make sure it continues to provide an environment where these creatures can thrive. Mowing too frequently, or not removing ‘problem plants’ like brambles and trees, could damage the harmonious interplay between different types of plant.

This year, with help from Greening Cathays and support from the National Heritage Lottery Innovation Fund, we’ve been trialling new methods of surveying the plant life so that Volunteers and non-specialist Museum staff can help us keep track of the meadow biodiversity. This will help us to manage the meadow in the future.

As well as contributing to our understanding of the meadow, our staff and volunteers have reported the well-being benefits of working outdoors:

“If I could, I would stay out here all day, it’s such a nice environment to be in”.

“I feel like I’m doing work – but it doesn’t have the stress of work. It’s the perfect balance”.

Staff and volunteers have also felt more motivated or confident to get involved outside of work:

“I have patch of grass at home, I’m now on a mission to rewild it. I really want to know how to do that, I feel more motivated now I’ve seen what can be there”.

"It’s quite empowering feeling you've recorded data that will be used, makes me want to get involved in more things like this".

What did we find?

On the Urban Meadow plants such as Common Bird’s-foot-trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), Lady’s Bedstraw (Galium verum) and Red Clover (Trifolium pratense) add colour to this part of the city every summer. The appearance of the meadow changes subtly throughout the season, depending on which plants are in flower.

Several native grasses, including Meadow foxtail (Alopecurus pratensis), Cock’s-foot (Dactylis glomerata) and Timothy (Phleum pratense) grow on the meadow.  However, we do not want the grasses to outcompete other species.

The vegetation surveys demonstrated that, although the meadow is relatively small, there is a mosaic of plant communities, reflecting small-scale differences in environmental factors.  For example, we found that one corner of the meadow is damper than the other three corners and a charmingly named grass called Yorkshire-fog (Holcus lanatus) has dominated here. 

To let other flowering plants, which attract insects for pollination, have some space to grow we are going to invite staff to help with sowing seeds of Yellow-rattle (Rhinanthus minor) this autumn. 

This annual plant is a parasite on grasses (Poaceae) meaning it gets nutrients by penetrating the roots of the grass, and restricting the its growth. Many meadows may need an application of Yellow-rattle seed this autumn because the grasses have coped better with the hot weather than the smaller brightly coloured plants. The Yellow-rattle seeds are sown in the autumn because they need to sit in the soil during the winter and experience the cold to germinate. The yellow flowers appear in spring, followed by seed pods which ‘rattle’.

We will also create training opportunities for staff and volunteers to help with scything the meadow to get the ground ready for the next year.

The Urban Meadow hasn’t just been an opportunity to increase biodiversity at National Museum Cardiff, it has helped people too. Cultivating a wildflower meadow takes years but is a testament to the resilience and ever-changing charm of the natural world. We hope to continue working with staff and volunteers to care for our meadow, for the benefit of people and plants.

Dear Bulb Buddies,

This is one of my favourite times of year! Schools across the UK will be getting outside to plant their bulbs as part of the Spring Bulbs for Schools Investigation. Each participating school was sent a crocus and a daffodil bulb for every pupil in the enlisted class to plant on 21 October (or the closest date possible). This means that some schools will be planting this week and others will plant next week. I look forward to sharing their fantastic photos with you. We run a Planting Day Photo Competition every year, so check in on this Bulb Blog again to see the winning images and follow @Professor_Plant on Twitter to see all of the fantastic photos shared!

We have many fun and engaging resources on the website. Some are specific to the investigation but others can be adapted for all schools. Resources developed to support this stage of the investigation can be found here:

Step 1: Preparing for planting day (early October)

Step 2: Planting day

Step 3: Optional hands-on weather and gardening themed activities

This will also be the second year that we run the Bulbcast competition. This is a fun and creative task that participating classes can undertake alongside the investigation. Our budding scientists are asked to plan, record and edit a short video exploring their favourite parts of the investigation. Resources to support this task can be found here, and the winners will be announced towards the end of the academic year. I can't wait to see what this years creative minds produce. I wonder how many schools will mention or show footage of planting day in their entries?

All participating schools were sent a new resource this year, a cheerful calendar that has been especially designed to help the class document their weather and flower data. This includes key dates for the investigation and a proposed structure for organising the data collection. Teachers can choose to split their class into five groups, who each take turns to document and upload the weather data. The hope is that this will help to give ownership of the investigation to the children.  As a result, we may very well see references to the different groups in the comments I'll share from schools over the course of the investigation. 

I look forward to sharing regular updates on the investigation with you. I hope you are celebrating Planting Day with me, as schools across the UK join together to plant over 18,000 bulbs in this collective action for nature. Go Bulb Buddies!

Professor Plant

The Summer holiday period saw the launch of the new sensory toy boxes at National Museum Cardiff. There are 5 boxes which are inspired by our collections and galleries. The boxes were developed to engage younger visitors and enhance their museum visit through multi sensory play. The boxes are located in five of our galleries and correspond with the objects on display such as woodland wildlife, sealife, dinosaurs and historical and contemporary art.

The boxes include a varied selection of toys and books which are accessible for children of all ages and needs. In museum spaces where collections on display cannot be handled, sensory resources allow children to learn through play and can spark intergenerational conversations about our collections.  

Visitors to the museum are encouraged to find all 5 boxes and share any feedback and photographs with us on X at @Amgueddfa_Learn.

The new academic year is well underway. Professor Plant and his happy helpers have packed and distributed 175 resource packs to schools across the UK. 

These packs contain everything that schools need to participate in this year's investigation:

- A pot and bulbs for each participating child

- A rain gauge and a thermometer to record weather data

- A calendar to keep track of weather and flower data

- Vouchers to purchase peat free compost

- The Term Planner outlining key dates for the project

- A biodegradable pot to compare different materials

- Mystery bulbs to learn about different plants 

On 21 October (or the closest date possible) schools are tasked with planting their Tenby daffodils and whitewell crocus bulbs. This is the first action for nature that participating schools will take as part of the project.  Please follow this blog and @Professor_Plant on X/ Twitter to see the images that are shared as we celebrate this mass planting.  @Professor_Plant will also share regular updates  from schools over the academic year and will celebrate with them when their plants start flowering!

The first resources needed by participating schools are: 

- Spring Bulbs for Schools: Teacher's guide 

- Step 1: Preparing for planting day

- Step 2: Planting day

All schools can follow the project and can use worksheets that are available on the website. 

I look forward to sharing with you all the fantastic work that our Super Scientists undertake as part of this project.

Professor Plant

When it came to writing this article, my thought space had been taken to the theme of journeys; the unknown ground between a beginning and an ending. My journey as a young producer for Bloedd’s latest project, an LGBTQIA+ oral histories exhibition, has been a nearly yearlong one. What began as conversation in a shared space containing mutual interests and passions, defined the nucleus of my work here. The beginnings of this time had been an unpacking of what we felt as a collective was important to represent for an upcoming exhibition. We knew from the jump that we wanted to represent voices that may often go unheard; those whose experience may not be recounted upon by the mainstream perception of what it means to live an LGBTQIA+ life. 

Moving away from the typical portrait of queerness being a thrown brick in protest, that while important, we are more than our fight for freedoms; our stories can be found in the everyday, in the places we visit, the jobs we keep, the people we love and share our lives with. The given name of this exhibition, Ours to Tell, came only after we had completed our collection of stories, the self-described journey we undertook over several months of visits and interviews, holding dialogue with well over fifty years of experience. But what is in a name? Ours to Tell is a reclamation. It’s our way of saying “here is a story, told by a firsthand account of the storyteller”. It’s our way of saying “these words are cut from a book hidden away in the attic of my mind. I’ve ventured into the attic, and I’m dusting it off for you.” It’s our way of saying “this is where I come from”. 

While the journey of this project has been underpinned by a great deal of planning and preparation, what you can’t prepare for is what you might uncover in someone else’s story. You commit to the routine of presenting a series of questions, from you to the storyteller, with only a table between you. It comes as a surprise the level of detail, which is excavated by the storyteller, they are like a hoarder being handed a stepladder, invited to dig up their stowed away possessions from the attic. Your questions are prompts: “when did you first see your identity reflected in someone else?”, “what does a safe space look like to you?”, the list goes on. The exciting part is that you don’t know what’s coming next, and you are there, alongside the storyteller, who guides you through a journey which may well bring up a familiarity or nostalgia for the listener. During these times when I’ve had the great pleasure to listen to these stories, I can confidently say that I have felt every kind of emotion in response. I laughed. I have cried. I have been moved. I have been taken on a journey.

Enabling the participants of this project to confidently speak about their experiences has proved an undeniable joy, though I cannot understate how this project has affected those coordinating its launch. Fellow young producer Joss Copeman, like me had been drawn to this exciting opportunity, Copeman’s “personal work is largely centred around queer narratives and themes of identity and the self.” The journey which unfolded from Ours to Tell has been greatly beneficial, as it pertains to young LGBTQIA+ creatives and makers, taking inspiration from unheard voices, now affected and transformed by echoes of their experience. This is a feeling I know will resonate with the audience, and I can only hope it will stir others in future, to share what might be put away, gathering dust in the attic. 

I’d like to conclude with a quote that shook me like a cat in a tree, “Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one’s own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us.”

Written by Ivy Kelly, Amgueddfa Cymru Producer (Bloedd).

Bloedd is the platform for youth engagement at Amgueddfa Cymru.