Tour this rewilded Welsh estate with over 1,000 species of moths
At Old Lands in Monmouthshire, south-east Wales, Sam Bosanquet is steering a quiet revolution on his family estate, Dingestow Court.
By restoring the 80 hectares of grassland around the house – and bringing in a generation of new tenant farmers to introduce a regenerative approach across the entire 405-hectare estate – Sam is slowly transforming the once intensively farmed fields into a species-rich landscape that is a beacon for bioversity.
Sam grew up immersed in the natural world. His great-uncle was the botanist and plant-hunter John Raven, father of British gardener and writer Sarah Raven.
His mother, Helen, has always been a keen gardener, and in the 1970s she started a wildlife-friendly kitchen garden near the house. She kept bees and planted the middle section with flowers for pollinators.
It was perhaps inevitable that Sam would follow in his family’s footsteps. At school, he was passionate about birds, and a lifelong interest in moths began when he borrowed a moth trap from school one summer. After studying biological science at Oxford, he joined the Countryside Council for Wales (now Natural Resources Wales) and has been studying and recording plants and animals ever since.
It was a job in Pembrokeshire as a grassland surveyor for CCW that cemented in Sam’s mind the vital importance of meadows for wildlife. “Grasslands are hugely biodiverse ecosystems that support so many different species,” he says.
“But they are so fragile, so easily lost, and the only way to manage them sustainably is by grazing. We’d lose thousands of species if we stopped grazing these fields, so if we all stopped eating meat it would have a significant negative effect on our biodiversity.”
Old Lands estate
Since Sam and his wife Clare took over the family estate in 2015, they have put all their efforts into restoring this grassland habitat. A few pockets of original grassland, which had escaped what the family called the “prairie treatment” in the 1960s, became the precious repository of native plants and insects that would gradually spread out across the other fields.
An ecological purist, Sam was determined not to re-seed or introduce any other species to his meadows, knowing that the species originating from there would best support the lifecycle of the native insects.
“It’s easy to make something that looks like a wild-flower meadow by ploughing a field and using a seed mix – but this doesn’t have the ecology of a true wild-flower meadow,” Sam says. “A re-seeded herbal ley might look flower-rich, but its annual plants only provide nectar for adult insects. Permanent pastures also offer foodplants for their larvae and the cover for them to pupate.”
While the native meadows define the ethos of this place, the relatively small pockets of cultivated garden bring more opportunities for pollinating insects. The walled kitchen garden lies at the heart of the place, filled with a mix of herbs
, vegetables and flowers. Magenta-pink hollyhocks jostle with bronze fennel, marigolds and kale, while dahlias and sweet peas grow among the beans.
In a courtyard near the arched entrance to the main house, borders full of seasonal flowers have been planted entirely with pollinators in mind, from the spring pulmonarias, which attract hairy-footed flower bees early in the season, to late-flowering asters in autumn. Sam has counted 50 species of bee in these borders alone.
A decade into his plan, Sam is already seeing hugely positive results on his land. A couple of years ago, he was ecstatic to find the first green winged orchid. “You only find this species in nature reserves and Sites of Special Scientific Interest now, but it would have been everywhere before the land was farmed intensively,” he says.
“It has tiny, tiny seeds that spread in the wind, but when those seeds land, they need exactly the right conditions to germinate – including a certain fungus in the soil. So if the soil has been highly cultivated, they just won’t germinate.”
An abundance of moths
Sam is a committed ecologist and his particular passion is still moths. He will often be found roaming his fields with a net to catch insects in his beloved moth trap. “Insect numbers have risen massively in the grassland fields,” he says. “I’ve been running my moth trap here now for 30 years and, as everywhere, the abundance of moths has generally gone down, but the diversity has gone up slightly. A good night now will be just as rich as 20 years ago, with about 500 individuals and 200 species in my moth trap.”
Elephant hawk moths, silver clouds, shoulder-striped wainscots and many other night-flying moths are among more than 1,000 moth species recorded at Old Lands, along with butterflies such as meadow browns and marbled whites, and day-flying moths such as the narrow-bordered five spot burnet.
Sam has also recorded more birds in the past few years, from redstarts and tree pipits to stonechats and barn owls, and kestrels bred here for the first time in decades in 2022. Grey partridges have returned after a 40-year absence. One bird that they hope to see here in the future is the cuckoo, which has become locally extinct, so they are working on creating the right conditions for the garden tiger moth, which produces large caterpillars known as woolly bears that the cuckoos love to feed on. “When the cuckoo finally shows its head, that will be the ultimate sign of success,” says Sam.
Explore more of Old Lands...
[/image
Find out more about Old Lands at old-lands.co.uk or on Instagram @oldlands.
Extracted from Pastoral Gardens by Andrew Montgomery and Clare Foster (Montgomery Press), which will be published in October. Receive a 10% discount when pre-ordering here using code CLPASTORAL10.
You Might Also Like
