British plants fighting for space
May 9, 2005
Britain has made good progress in trying to preserve some of its rarest wild plants, but it has largely failed to halt widespread species decline.
That is one key message to come out of the new Vascular Plant Red Data List for Great Britain, published by a coalition of botanists.
The report represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of the state of the UK's flora.
It shows that out of 1,756 taxa, about one in five are currently threatened.
The analysis laments the near-disappearance from large areas of the country of arable "weeds", such as the prickly poppy.
This population of wild flowers that once proliferated in field margins has seen perhaps the steepest decline of all plant groups in the past 40 years.
They have been pushed out by highly intensive methods of crop production that give little opportunity for competing seed to flourish on farmland.
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