Wildlife

The Garden has an amazing diversity of wild plant and animal life – some of it familiar and some very rare.

Across our mosaic of lakes, streams, marsh, semi-natural woodland, meadows and formal gardens we provide a home to over 1000 species. These include

• over 100 types of butterfly and moth
• hundreds of native plant species
• more than 56 varieties of birds
• thousands of frogs, toads and palmate newts
• common lizards, grass snakes and slow worms
• twenty species of mammal.

We can also boast of over 180 types of lichen, many rare types of fungi and 92 varieties of moss. We even know of 26 types of snail.

So why is there so much biodiversity?
The soil here is fertile. Boulder clay, dumped when glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago, has mixed in with the underlying sandy and silty soils derived from Old Red Sandstone bedrock below.

The climate is wetter and warmer than much of Britain and the air is kept clean by prevailing Atlantic winds.

But the main reason may be that large parts of our farmland escaped the kind of over-intensive management which removed native plants from much of the British countryside during the 20th century. So rare plants and fungi, such as greater butterfly orchid, whorled caraway and waxcap fungi, together with a large range of invertebrates such as crickets, bugs, butterflies and moths, have had a safe home on our meadows. Badgers have been allowed to root amongst the mossy grassland for their main diet of earthworms and otters to hunt on the wet meadows for amphibians in spring. The tussocky nature of some of the grassland encourages voles, which in turn feed barn owls and other birds of prey, such as the great success story for Welsh nature conservation, the red kite.

Our estate has also retained pockets of diverse semi-natural woodland. Boggy alder carr woodland near the Gatehouse contrasts with the drier oak, ash and hazel woods of Pont Felin Gat in the northern end, where bluebell, anemone and golden saxifrage carpet the ground in spring. These, and small hazel coppices, are rich in birds, ferns, mosses, lichens and fungi. They also provide a home for the dormouse, one of Britain’s most endangered mammals.

 

 Waun Las Fungi Survey 2007

 

Following the award of a CCW Species Challenge grant, the National Botanic Garden of Wales have brought in expert mycologists to conduct surveys on a 20hectare section of its organic farmland, known as the Waun Las Meadows.

Here, surveys completed by renowned mycologist Maurice Rotheroe in the 1990s we revealed a high quality collection of rare grassland fungi. He found over 20 species of waxcap fungi here but we never quite knew what they all were.

Now thanks to surveys carried out this autumn by Debbie Evans, with input from Dr Philip Jones of Llanelli Naturalists and Ray Woods from Plantlife, we now know about 18 waxcap species that Maurice would have found. We also know that we’ve also got a good variety of fairy cubs, crazed caps, spindles and pink gills. Found together like this, they indicate a very high quality unimproved meadow.

 

 

An important part of the project was to train up Garden volunteers to help survey this year and to monitor the meadows in future years. This initial group of eight have formed a kind of Botanic Garden Fungi Group. They will continue the learning process with regular meetings and will provide a valuable knowledge base for monitoring fungi across the Botanic Garden.

If you’d like to be involved in this (it is open to all fungi enthusiasts whatever your ability), contact Bruce Langridge on interpretation@gardenofwales.org.uk.

Also if you’d like to see a full fungi species list for Waun Las Meadows, please contact Bruce on the same email address.