Dr. Clare Lawson from The Open University unpacked the science behind cutting edge research into wildflower floodplain meadows as effective, reliable, and long-term nature-based solution in sequestering much of Earth’s atmospheric carbon (equal to trees and peat bogs). As wildflower floodplain meadows are never ploughed all the carbon sequestered by the plants and excreted through the roots into the soil, remains there. We compared soil sample from Long Mead meadow and others from conventionally ploughed fields and the difference in structure was striking.

In the ‘pigment’ half of the workshop, artist Eric White talked about charcoal as an art medium. He distributed charcoal, some of which he had made himself from a willow tree (heating the sticks at a high temperature until all that was left was carbon). We experimented with many techniques, from faintly brushing the graphite against the paper, to applying greater pressure creating thick dark lines, to smudging the drawings with our fingers and rubbing out with white bread! We took inspiration from Eric’s own artwork, as well as David Hockney’s charcoal drawings, before heading outside to put our learning into practice, using the charcoal to record our observations of the meadow - the meadow storing all that carbon under the surface!