Nursery pours in help for aquatic nature

Work is underway to pour protection for water loving wild plants.

Denbighshire County Council’s Biodiversity team is turning their hand to plants of a different kind for a new project at the Council Tree Nursery at St Asaph.

The site currently grows thousands of trees and wildflowers all sourced locally from the county to go back into boosting Denbighshire’s nature. This project is funded by Welsh Government, through the Local Nature Partnerships Cymru ENRaW project.

Inside the nursery brooklime is currently growing in containers filled with water for a project that is spearheading a push to boost local aquatic plants in ponds across the county.

Brooklime is ideal for ponds as it can improve water quality and can provide useful egg laying habitat for species such as newts, as well as offering other biodiversity boosts.  

Similarly, outside the nursery in two developed ponds, common water crowfoot is also growing. This plant also offers oxygenation and shelter, forming part of a thriving ecosystem.

Biodiversity Officer Evie Challinor explained: “Aquatic plants play just as an important role for protecting local nature as our wildflowers in the county do. We’ve started growing the brooklime inside the nursery with a view to producing enough local provenance, native material for us to do enhancement planting into ponds that might need a helping hand.”

“We are also looking to track down any ponds with good populations of native plants that we can potentially collect from, so any folks with ponds of their own, with non-planted up aquatic plants are of interest to the team.

She added: “Carrying out this work we are equally happy to have contacts for people who want advice on their ponds as we are looking to build a collaborative network so that people can exchange best practices.”

Anyone interested in supporting this project or finding out more can email Evie at biodiversity@denbighshire.gov.uk