From windowsills to wetlands: rare plants help to restore Oxfordshire freshwaters

From windowsills to wetlands: rare plants help to restore Oxfordshire freshwaters - Freshwater Habitats Trust

Freshwater Habitats Trust is moving around 500 endangered plants from homes and community centres across Oxfordshire to local freshwater habitats. With many ‘lost’ species being reintroduced, the wildlife conservation charity is bringing back wildlife to Oxfordshire’s freshwaters, fens and wetlands.

Over the summer, the Oxford-based charity invited people to volunteer for its GroWet project. Approximately 500 people signed up to nurture a rare wetland plant in their gardens and even on their windowsills. The plants were grown from seed and cuttings at Oxford Botanic Garden before being delivered to homes and community centres.

five petalled star shaped white flowers with yello/green stamens in the middle, gorwing in a marshy, grassy land — Grass of Parnassus (photo: ian Lindsay)

With the help of volunteers, Freshwater Habitats Trust is now planting some of the GroWet plants at Otmoor RSPB reserve, just outside Oxford. The team will then introduce plants to other ponds, streams and wetlands across the county.

They include 27 native species, which were once plentiful in the British countryside and across Oxfordshire but are now in decline. Some are so rare they are at risk of becoming extinct in England without the sort of help being offered through GroWet. Some of the rarest examples are:

Grass-of-Parnassus: a striking white-flowered plant of fens, which is locally scarce in Oxfordshire, with only two locations recorded in the county since 2010.
Tawny-sedge, which grows in peatlands and damp meadows and, in Oxfordshire, is now limited to ten sites.
Tubular Water-dropwort, which is classed as Vulnerable on the UK Red Data Book list, having declined dramatically since the 1950s particularly because of wetland drainage and pollution.