The bright side of the road

All over the UK, there are thousands of public green spaces where plants and animals flourish, biodiversity abounds and rare species find a home. They’ve got great access too, but you might not want to start packing that picnic just yet. Roadside verges are a wildlife success story in the UK – liminal, overlooked and underdeveloped, they’re often essentially fragments of ancient wildflower meadows, and because we’ve lost 97 per cent of those since the 1930s, the bits that border the road network are vital and precious.

There are 310,000 miles of rural roadside in the UK, and in the last few years, mindful