A RETIRED biologist is on a mission to bring wildlife back to Windermere churchyards.

Janet Ashton, who taught biology and chemistry in Surrey until she retired to the Lake District, is working with churches in the area to persuade them that churchyards should be less tidy.

“There’s a great potential for much more wildlife in our churchyards if only we didn’t mow and strim every bit of grass,” she said.

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Janet, who has done survey work with the Cumbria Wildlife Trust and the Haymeadow Project, was asked to check the churchyards by green campaigners Windermere Reflections.

She has worked with St Mary’s, Our Lady and St Herbert RC Church and Windermere Methodist Church, and also Jesus Church near her home in Troutbeck.

Her work involved surveying each site, recording the wildlife she saw and giving specific, practical advice for each one.

“Churches were usually built on old, unimproved grassland which means there’s great potential for meadow flowers and plants to thrive,” she said.

Leaving areas of long grass encourages voles, woodmice and hedgehogs, as well as birds, to return.

Because most churches were built on meadows, traditional meadow plant species including red clover, meadow buttercup and pignut can often thrive in them if left to flower.

“There has been too much effort to try and make graveyards look like municipal parks,” said Janet.

“It’s happened very gradually, firstly with the invention of the lawnmower and, more recently, the strimmer.

“With these mechanical tools has come the impulse to manicure lawns and manicured churchyards are a product of the last 50 or 60 years.

“A lot of people get very angry when people let the grass grow but you only have to leave it uncut during the flowering season, roughly from early May to the end of July.”

Windermere Reflections project officer Debbie Binch said: “It’s great that churches have been keen to take Janet up on her offer of grounds surveys and advice for wildlife, and even better that some of them are now putting her recommendations into practice.