Hounslow Council is bringing people and organisations together to help protect and restore tower mustard (Turritis glabra), one of the capital’s rarest plant species.
Citizen Zoo launched a collaborative conservation programme to reintroduce the rare herb, this week. The project is funded by the Mayor of London’s Green Roots Fund and Thames Water and brings together Hounslow Council and Lampton Countryside Rangers, alongside a network of other land managers and community partners.
Volunteer citizen scientists in Hounslow will learn how to grow and care for tower mustard from seed, at home, beginning in March. In the autumn, they will join coordinated planting days at carefully selected sites on Hounslow Heath. This is one of just five suitable sites across the species’ historic London range.
Tower mustard is currently thought to survive at just 30 sites across England and currently at only two sites in London, where seeds have been sourced for the project. Plants grow to around one metre tall and produce delicate white flowers. Tower mustard supports vital pollinators including native bees, butterflies and rare moths.
Councillor Salman Shaheen, Cabinet Member for Culture, Leisure and Public Spaces, said
Hounslow is one of London's greenest boroughs and with Hounslow Heath making up 5 percent of London’s remaining heathland, it's the perfect place to see the planting of Tower Mustard as part of our widespread and ongoing nature recovery work.
I want to thank all the volunteers stepping forward to bring this vital project to life.
Sometimes, when we read the news about world leaders ripping up climate agreements and the rampant destruction of our natural world, it's easy to throw our hands up in despair. But it's times like these that we must remember it is so often the little actions of those at the grassroots, in our communities, that can make a big difference to the places we love."
Elliot Newton, Director of Rewilding at Citizen Zoo, said
The mission to rewild our city isn’t something we can achieve alone. It needs genuine collaboration between conservation organisations, local authorities and local communities, and this project shows what that looks like in practice. Too often, plants get overlooked in conservation, they can slip into local extinction without people noticing, a symptom of wider plant blindness, despite how crucial they are to healthy ecosystems. By putting tower mustard in the spotlight and working together at scale, we can demonstrate how to bring a rare London species back from the brink.
This project builds on the Council’s new Nature Network, where local people can find other nature conservation work in Hounslow, and get involved.
Anyone interested in volunteering as a “Tower Mustard Guardian” can contact the council’s parks team at countryside@hounslow.gov.uk
