Open Country

Thriplow Daffodil Weekend in Cambridgeshire started as a way of raising money for a church roof in 1968. Nearly sixty years later, it is thriving. More than 40,000 bulbs are planted each year to create the incredible displays and a small village of just 250 residents welcomes more than 10,000 visitors over the weekend. Martha Kearney joins them to discover what’s involved, meeting the organiser Paul Earnshaw and ‘daffodil Tom’ who spends his winter planting the bulbs.
Daffodils are ubiquitous in spring in Britain. We see them on vergesides and gardens across the country, but the flower is not native to the UK. Martha visits Cambridge Botanic Garden to find out more about the history and use of the humble daff. There are around 30,000 varieties of daffodil, or narcissus, grown - but some varieties are extremely rare. The Royal Horticultural Society is asking gardeners to log any pink blooms, to find out how many are left.
Celebrated in literature and used for centuries in medicine, there is much more to the daffodil - as Martha finds out on her travels in Cambridgeshire.
Producer: Helen Lennard

Martha Kearney visits Wallasea Island in Essex, the largest manmade coastal nature reserve in Europe. It was created from the 3 million tonnes of London clay that were excavated in the digging out of the Elizabeth Line.
The RSPB project used soil from the Crossrail scheme to raise the land, and flood almost 170 hectares of arable land to create saltmarsh, mudflats and lagoons. This was to mitigate for land loss as sea levels rise and it’s the only place that has raised land in order to bring the sea back. It’s the largest complex of saline lagoons in the UK.
The project tells an unusually positive story about adapting to climate change and coastal erosion before it happens, for the benefit of nature. Martha goes to see the waders and waterbirds that now over-winter there.
Producer: Beth O'Dea

The Stroudwater canal in Gloucestershire was built in the 1770s. It brought coal to the mills along the Stroud valleys, which had become an important centre for the manufacture of woollen cloth, but the arrival of the railways in the mid 19th century led to the canal's decline and eventual abandonment. A mile-long section of it was filled in when the M5 motorway was built in the 1960s, cutting the canal off from the rest of the inland waterways network. Now ambitious multi-million plans are underway to restore and re-open the "missing mile" and reconnect the canal.
Martha Kearney visits the Stroudwater canal to see how the work is going. She talks to volunteers, and finds out what difference the work will make to the canal - as a local amenity, as a tourist attraction and as a wildlife corridor.
Producer: Emma Campbell

Martha Kearney visits the unique cave dwellings at Kinver Edge that were lived in until the 1960s. Cosy cottages were built into the soft red sandstone with windows and doors and families lived in them for generations. Martha looks around a cottage which has been restored as it was when it was lived in and hears about the family that lived there. She also finds out about the heathland restoration project which is bringing rare wildlife back to this valuable sandscape. And she meets Brett Westwood to try and track some of it down.
Producer Beth O'Dea
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/shropshire-staffordshire/kinver-edge-and-the-rock-houses

Hedges are such a traditional part of the British landscape that most of us don't give them a second thought. They're usually associated with the enclosures of the 17th-19th centuries, when the medieval farming system gave way to enclosed fields surrounded by hedges - designed to keep sheep in and people out. But, as Martha Kearney finds out, many hedges are far older than that - going back thousands of years in some cases.
In this programme, Martha explores the history and future of the hedge. She learns that there are an estimated 400,000 miles of hedgerow in Britain, despite the fact that many hedges were grubbed up and destroyed in the years since the Second World War. She talks to a wildlife expert, who explains why hedges are so important for wildlife and outlines the vital role they have to play in the ecosystem.
Martha visits a hedge-laying course in Devon, where trainees are learning this ancient skill, and tries her hand at the craft using a billhook. She discovers that Devon has a hedge style all of its own.
Producer: Emma Campbell