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Plants and Wildlife of the Downs

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come

Song of Solomon

What makes the South Downs so special?

Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, everyone drawn to the National Park will have their own response to its lure. It could be a sense of space that attracts, or the subtle curves and folds of the landscape, the steeply plunging north-facing slopes, the dazzling white cliffs at the eastern end, the intimate inner valleys. It could be its history, or its villages. For the walker with an eye for more than just a view with a footpath disappearing through it, a good part of its appeal must surely rest on the flowers that speckle the downland and the birdsong that serenades each mile.

The thin soil of the downland, lying on an immense bed of chalk, is sorely deficient in certain minerals, yet a variety of plant species will be in flower from spring right through to autumn. Among those that favour chalk-rich soils are the rough hawkbit, common milkwort, bulbous buttercup and salad burnet. On open grasslands, the regular grazing by sheep and rabbits over hundreds of years has kept the natural spread of scrub and woodland in check, which has enabled flowering plants to thrive, but elsewhere isolated deposits of clay-with-flint indicate the existence of deeper, more fertile soils that encourage small clumps of trees to stand out in an otherwise bare and open land.