£10k project to protect rare flower

An endangered wild flower growing in the Midlands will get help to survive under a £10,000 conservation project.

The Kidderminster area is one of the last places where the rare Tower Mustard – a tall, slim, grey-green plant with small cream flowers – can still be found in Britain today. It was never a common species but numbers have declined in recent decades.

Now only 35 sites remain, mostly in Worcestershire and Suffolk, and the southern counties of England.

Conservation charity Plantlife with funding from the SITA(cor) Trust and Natural England is now hoping to save the wild flower.

It will focus on six sites on the verges of tracks or roads around Kidderminster and make the habitat favourable to Tower Mustard.

It will also expand available habitat to allow the species to spread and increase in number as well as re-introducing it to protected sites or nature reserves nearby to ensure its future survival in the area.

The main threat for the plant is habitat destruction due to intensive agriculture and building developments as well as habitat neglect, which results in smothering of the delicate stems by surrounding coarse vegetation.

Plantlife's Site Management Coordinator, Tim Wilkins, who is managing the project, said: "The project offers real hope for this wild flower.

The Kidderminster area supports one of the last concentrations of this species in Britain."