Abstract

Wildflower meadows are widely recognised to be in severe decline across rural Britain, with estimates suggesting the loss of around 97% of species-rich grasslands since the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, wildflower meadows are proliferating in cities – where they are increasingly deployed as instruments of urban nature recovery, climate adaptation, and place-making. How, then, did the meadow come to be reconstituted as an urban landscape form in the UK? This paper explores this question through the proliferation of the ‘modular meadow’: an ecological formation that has become dislocated from its traditional agro-ecological definition, mass produced at scale within agronomic systems to be purchased ‘off the shelf’, and subsequently respatialised, or ‘rolled out’, within the urban environment. But the meadow does not travel intact. Once installed, modular meadows are metabolised by urban conditions, giving rise to novel, recombinant ecologies that exceed design intention while often overwriting existing, sensitive urban ecological conditions. This research deployed a ‘follow the thing’ methodology to understand the political, cultural and ecological forces that constitute the urban wildflower meadow. It traces meadows from their production in rural wildflower farms, their uptake and installation by urban planners and designers, and their ongoing enmeshment with existing urban ecologies. The paper concludes by arguing for more situated, historically informed, and ecologically attuned approaches to urban meadow-making.