Coronation Meadow has become a wildflower inspiration

A Norfolk wildflower meadow created to commemorate the Queen's Golden Jubilee is now helping to inspire more nature projects in her Platinum Jubilee year.

In 2012, Prince Charles launched a national scheme to use seeds from flagship wildflower sites to create new meadows in every county to mark the 60th anniversary of the Queen's coronation.

The idea was to preserve outstanding surviving fragments of flower-rich grasslands – of which an estimated 97pc had been lost during the previous century.

Norfolk's Coronation Meadow at Fir Grove Farm in Wreningham, near Wymondham, was created using seed-rich "green hay" harvested from the Wood Lane Roadside Nature Reserve, near Long Stratton.

And 10 years after the launch of the initiative, experts are using the Norfolk site to teach landowners and community groups about the ecology, creation and management of wildflower meadows.

Project partners Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT) and the Norfolk Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (Norfolk FWAG) held a practical workshop at Fir Grove as part of NWT's Claylands Wilder Connections project.

Helen Baczkowska, NWT's acting conservation manager, said: "The whole idea behind Coronation Meadows was to create new meadows using seed from old meadows.

"It was an absolutely brilliant initiative, and Fir Grove is now so successful we are hoping other people will be able to pick this up and learn how to do it.

"We started with a field which was a mix of grasses and didn't have many flowers on it  - and that is typical of a lot of grassland in Norfolk.

"We brought in the seed in the green hay from the roadside nature reserve, and now when you look around you see flowers like oxeye daisy, yellow rattle and nationally-rare sulphur clover."

Since the start of the project, the partners have used similar techniques to create new meadows at other sites and to expand the size of the original meadow at Fir Grove.

Ben Newton, NWT's habitat connectivity officer, said: "We cut the green hay in August, we prepare the ground and we spread it on the area of grassland we want to enhance.

"That has happened over the last ten years and there has been a steady increase in the amount of flowers, the diversity of species, and the associated wildlife and invertebrates."