Ten species have become extinct in the 60-year reign of HM The Queen but even that stark loss hides the scale of the problem. In this report we reveal the rate of loss of flowers from over 50 counties across England, Scotland and Wales, covering more than half of the British land area. British counties hold, on average, about 950 native species of flowers. They range from South Hampshire, the richest, with 1,265 species, to Shetland, the poorest, with 473 species. We have selected counties across England, Scotland and Wales to illustrate the loss of our wild flowers and the factors behind them.
Berwickshire
The former county of Berwickshire lies in the Scottish Borders and is predominately hilly with the best farmland in the large catchment of the Tweed. Among the characteristic habitats are species-rich grassland, especially along the coast, river habitats, bogs, wet grassland and heather moors. The county has a botanical heraldic badge – a bull chained to a wych elm. It is in fourth place on our league table. Berwickshire has been well-recorded, and we can say something about the status of its scarcer, and, in many ways, most characteristic plants (characteristic in that they are the species that make Berwick distinct from its neighbours). And it is unsettling. The county recorder revisited 162 populations of “locally rare and scarce species” recorded between 1987 and 1995 and found that 45 are no longer present. This represents a loss rate in this group of 16% per decade. The drivers of change are various but similar to other parts of Britain: short, species-rich plant communities replaced by taller vegetation dominated by grasses and rushes; gradual attrition of wild places; muirburn of heather, which seems to have wiped out petty whin.
North Aberdeenshire
North Aberdeenshire occupies the extreme north-east of Scotland comprising the old Scottish earldoms of Gordon and Buchan. The only two large towns, Fraserburgh and Peterhead, are on the coast and inland it forms an undulating plain with hills and small rivers. Much of the land is intensively farmed, especially since the introduction of autumn-sown barley in the 1970s. Most of the bogs which formerly occupied the land have been drained. Many too were stripped of their overlying peat and reclaimed as farmland or planted forest. The county is botanically impoverished with only 833 species and hybrids recorded between 1950 and 1992. On our cautious assessment, North Aberdeenshire has lost, on average, a species every three years. However, the vice-county recorder suggests that 42 species have been lost over 92 years making a higher loss rate of 0.46 or 0.5 in round figures i.e. one species lost every two years. North Aberdeenshire has lost a particularly high proportion (24%) of scarce plants. Others are just hanging on. Great sundew, a signature species of wet bogs, was still plentiful in a few ‘mosses’ in the early twentieth century but the species seemed to have died out in our own time until a tiny and precarious colony was rediscovered recently. What its near-loss suggests is that all the peat bogs where it grew in North Aberdeenshire are now degraded.
Warwickshire
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows”. It is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare had come across such a place in his native Warwickshire,
and indeed flowery banks breathing of thyme, honeysuckle and musk roses were no doubt commonplace in Elizabethan England. But today wild thyme is scarce in Warwickshire and confined to a few patches in calcareous grassland and quarries. Of the other flowers that grew on the fairies’ bank, ‘eglantine’ (sweet briar) and oxlips (by which Shakespeare meant the cowslip-primrose hybrid), are also scarce, and even the “nodding violet” can be hard to find in the agricultural south of the county. Only ’woodbine’ or honeysuckle and ‘musk rose’ (i.e. field-rose) are still quite frequent in the county. The chance of finding all these plants on the same bank anywhere in the Midlands today is slight. In Warwickshire there is no chance at all.
Warwickshire is in the middle of the league table with a loss rate of 0.35 species per year. A bar chart in the latest county flora indicates that extinctions between 1960 and 1970 greatly exceeded any earlierperiod. Hence our figure may possibly underestimate the true rate of loss. Some extant species, such as man orchid and dropwort are confined to protected sites and depend on conservation management for their survival.
On our calculations, the native flora of some other Midlands counties is at least as parlous as Warwickshire’s. Leicestershire has a loss rate of 0.68, Bedfordshire 0.61 and Lincolnshire 0.45 (a lower rate perhaps because Lincolnshire is a larger county).
Kincardine and Angus
Kincardine and Angus are old Scottish counties on the south-east fringe of the Highlands. Their lowlands are intensively farmed while the uplands
have been much afforested, especially in Kincardine. Fields are often ploughed right up to the edge; lowland lochs have become more eutrophic through run-off and the coast has suffered from the spread of coarse vegetation and piecemeal development. Both counties have experienced extensive plant losses, especially among the scarcer species. Despite assiduous searching, the county recorder of Kincardine was able to refind only 25 scarce species out of 52 recorded there, representing a loss rate of 48%. 25 archaeophytes haven’t been seen in Angus since 1980. Whether or not they are really gone, bothcounties have clearly experienced a very adverse period for the survival of wild plants. On our assessment the situation in Angus is similar to that of North Aberdeen with a loss average of 0.3 species per year. The pronounced loss of archaeophytes mentioned above may reflect the loss of valuable field margin habitats on farms.
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire is a small county that nonetheless contains most lowland natural habitats. It has chalk grassland, acid grassland and heath, ancient woods, meadows, ponds, streams and a big slow river, and even scraps of fen. It is rich in rare plants. It is more than usually well recorded with a large and recent county flora. And it also has more than its measure
of environmental change including wholesale eutrophication of soils and water, agricultural intensification, quarrying, afforestation and creeping
suburbs. Famous plant localities include Knocking Hoe, Barton Hills, Sandy Heath, Flitwick Moor, Mauldon meadows and King’s Wood. The county has experienced a relatively high rate of loss. Some 52 native and archaeophyte species have been lost over the past 80 years, making a yearly rate of 0.65, slightly under the rate for neighbouring Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire but similar to Leicestershire and Essex. The losses were highest between 1970 and 1980; there are no subsequent data. Of the county’s bryophytes, 32 out of 315 species or 10% are probably extinct,
although some other species are increasing, probably in response to cleaner air. What makes Bedfordshire special, however, is a series of plots all over the county whose plants were originally recorded in 1950. They were traced
and re-recorded in 2003-2004 and the results are described in detail in the new county flora. And what they reveal is shocking. The acid grassland,
a habitat rich in plants, has almost all gone. 80% of Bedfordshire’s meadows (neutral grassland) has gone. What used to be short, open plant communities have become taller, shadier and dominated by competitive
plants such as shrubs, nettles, thistles and tall grasses. Only some of the woodland plots are little changed. The attributed causes include chemical
fertiliser, increased ploughing and the cessation of traditional management such as grazing and coppicing. Many of the county’s rare plants survive
only in nature reserves and other protected sites.
Wiltshire
By our reckoning, Wiltshire is the most fortunate county in Britain in botanical terms. The figures indicate that the county has lost less than one
(0.8) species per decade. However the Wiltshire Flora Mapping Project of 1984-92 included an appendix of species it had failed to refind since the last flora of 1975 including several species of pondweeds and sedges, orchids such as narrowlipped helleborine and narrow-leaved helleborine, and the yellow star-of-Bethlehem. Nonetheless we can still assert that Wiltshire is a safer place for rare plants than most other counties. We can only speculate why that may be. The county is relatively rich in woodland and wet grassland and Salisbury plain is the largest area of calcareous grassland in NW Europe, protected under European law. Of great significance to the survival of rare plants is the small corner of the county abuttingthe New Forest where species of heathland and wet, acid grassland find a refuge. Road verges possibly offer another refuge, since herbicides have not been
used extensively there. Nonetheless the low apparent loss rate masks
significant losses of natural habitat. A significant proportion of chalk downs and wet meadows have been ploughed. There is little good quality chalk
downland left on the Marlborough Downs and of fritillary meadows still present in the 1960s, only 11 had survived by 1992. Five fritillary
meadows have been destroyed since 1992. Some once widespread species have much decreased, including juniper and the ‘Wiltshire weed’, meadow cranesbill that once turned the road verges a shimmering blue in high summer. Even in this apparently safest of counties, things are not
what they were.
Source: Plant Life - How wild flowers are disappearing across Britain (attached)
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