Most meadow surveys count the orchids and skip the grasses, which is backwards — grasses are what actually tell you whether a meadow is old, unimproved, and worth the trip. This catalogue works region by region and leads with the grasses, because a hay meadow with fifteen showy forbs and no yellow-rattle or crested dog's-tail is usually a recent reseed, whatever it looks like from the gate in June.
Species list, by flowering month
Indicator species note
The ratio of broadleaf herb species to grass species is a faster read on meadow quality than any single plant. A count showing roughly a third to a half of the cover as non-grass herbs — knapweed, scabious, betony, rattle — usually means the field has not been reseeded or heavily fertilised in living memory. A field that reads as almost solid rye-grass with a scatter of buttercup is telling you the opposite, however green it looks from the road.
Yellow rattle earns particular attention because it is semi-parasitic on grass roots; a strong rattle population actively suppresses the more vigorous grasses and is often why an old meadow supports so many finer species at once — the rattle is doing the mowing's job for the rest of the sward.
Site condition entries
River terrace meadow, west bank
Cut once in July, aftermath grazed lightly through autumn. Strong sweet vernal-grass presence gives the whole field its hay smell days before cutting. Herb ratio holds at roughly two-fifths across three seasons surveyed.
Churchyard extension field
Never reseeded within any record found; quaking-grass abundant on the drier south-facing third, sweet-grass at the wetter northern edge near the ditch. One of the few sites here with devil's-bit scabious still present.
Old railway cutting meadow
Narrow strip, ungrazed, cut annually by volunteers rather than for hay. Rattle population has visibly thickened since cutting began ten years ago, with a corresponding thinning of coarse grasses noted each survey.