The Cherishing Sidmouth Cemeteries volunteers were hard at work yesterday just before a heavy midday shower, renovating neglected shrubs and weeding the Winslade border, ready for some new autumn planting to come.
They also took time to enjoy the wildflowers.
Here’s a photo taken by a member of the working party of ragwort flowers which are providing useful late summer food for insects. This plant was traditionally seen as unwelcome in meadows – and indeed the Sidmouth Cemetery was once an area of ‘unimproved meadowland’ so will still see wildflowers coming up.
Now that livestock are no longer grazing in the Cemetery, there is of course no issue with this great resource being given the space to live and thrive here…

In fact, ragwort, or as tradition would have it, aka the ‘deadly daisy’, is home to many invertebrates and as the National Trust says, its a feast for pollinators.
There’s a very interesting podcast from the Knepp project: The Plant People Love to Hate:
It’s been a bumper summer for ragwort, the plant folks love to hate. In this month’s Knepp Wilding Podcast, Isabella Tree unearths the truth about this spectacular native wildflower with ragwort specialist, Mick Crawley. Is it a toxic killer or a bountiful source of life? And what happens when you pull it up? Could trying to eradicate it actually be helping the plant to proliferate?
Meanwhile, in the older part of the Cemetery, here’s a photo of another volunteer standing by the new EDDC notice which has a QR code to take readers to more information about their aim to improve areas such as this for wildlife.

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