George Peterken and Elsa Wood explore the parishes of Hewelsfield and St Briavels, comparing the vascular plants that were once recorded there to the floral list of today.
Our wild flora is changing rapidly. At the national scale, 20 native species have become extinct (Dines 2017), while numerous non-natives have ‘jumped the garden fence’ and established themselves as self-perpetuating populations. A glance at the Atlas of the British Flora (Preston et al. 2002) quickly reveals that populations of many more native species have thinned out in the intensively farmed lowlands and some have become regionally extinct.