Before Heene Cemetery's one-acre town-centre site was made into a cemetery in 1873 it was what botanists call 'an old meadow community'. The houses that surround it today had not been built. The land would probably have been used to provide hay for animal food. The grasses and flowers would have been either lightly grazed or cut by hand.
Across Britain, since the 1930s over 97% of our wildflower meadows have been lost. Ploughing, spraying, grazing and building have taken their toll on the natural environment. Meadowland that has survived this onslaught holds out in small pockets of land dotted across the country—surprisingly, even in some of our towns and cities.
Today—a hundred and fifty years later—Heene Cemetery is one of these survivors, still exhibiting the vestiges of its meadowland origins. Botanists describe this as old meadowland flora, otherwise known as a British NVC community MG5. That the cemetery has 9 out of 10 of the key species for that specific meadowland habitat—not to mention more than a further 200 flowering plant species—is noteworthy. Many of these plants, like those listed on this page—and which the cemetery has—are typical meadowland species. This is uncommon in southern England, and the cemetery's designation as a Sussex Local Wildlife Site is a reflection of this special character. Although there may be few species (so far) of national note, the location of this species-rich site in an urban environment is unusual.
This rich assembly of plants and flowers attracts an equally rich array of invertebrates, pollinators, butterflies and moths, other insects and birds. The mosaic of interrelationships and dependencies involved between these species as exploiter and exploited is as fascinating as it is fragile. And, unlike in typical meadows, the cemetery also has a rich diversity of fungi and lichen, but the core ecological interest of the site is its meadowland origin.