Britain’s roads are becoming messier and more colourful

AS THEY PICK their way through a road verge on the outskirts of Blandford Forum, Giles Nicholson of Dorset Council and Phil Sterling of Butterfly Conservation list the plants they see. Being wildflowers, these mostly have common names, not the Latin monikers that gardeners use for their potted perennials: bird’s-foot trefoil, black knapweed, field scabious, lady’s bedstraw, ploughman’s-spikenard, pyramidal orchid, self-heal, wild carrot. “If it was bigger, it would be a nature reserve,” says Mr Nicholson, as the cars roar by.

This small patch of ground near a Lidl supermarket was a test bed. Since 2016 it has been managed with the aim of generating diverse native flowers, and the insects that feed on them, for little money—less than it would cost to mow the grass in the normal fashion. It has been influential, seeding other experiments in Dorset and elsewhere. Over the next few years more parts of Britain will start to look equally ragged and colourful.

Although road verges seem trivial next to great blocks of forest, moorland and farmland, they are collectively substantial. In a new paper, Benjamin Phillips of the University of Exeter and others estimate that road verges cover 257,900 hectares (637,000 acres), or 1.2% of Britain’s land area. That is more land than is owned by the National Trust, a large conservation...