Published1 hour ago
Rosemary Parslow crawls on her hands and knees across the frozen ground under a wintry sky.
Most other visitors to the Scilly Islands are holed up with family and friends.
But this natural history lover has other things on her mind: discovering a tiny endangered fern that blooms in the middle of winter.
It’s become something of a seasonal tradition for Rosemary, to the bewilderment of her three children.
“They all thought I was totally barking,” she says of her trips to find the plant. “Obviously, it gave a certain flavour to Christmas.”
Rosemary dedicates her time to repeatedly returning to the islands to map rare and precious flora found almost nowhere else in Britain. She nearly drowned searching for one of the plants and is seeing first-hand the impacts of climate change.
After decades of adventures on the archipelago, she says she is determined to share her knowledge with a new generation of conservationists.
The Isles of Scilly, just off the coast of Cornwall, are made up of more than 100 islands, most of which are uninhabited.
They have a unique natural history, harbouring rare and beautiful wild flowers, globally important seabirds and unusual sea creatures.
Rosemary first visited the islands in 1958 to ring seabirds. “I fell in love with the islands and I’ve never looked back,” she says.
She eventually struck gold, discovering dozens of the rare ferns – called
The post The woman who spent Christmas in search of a rare plant appeared first on EnviroLink Network.