In the 50 years to 1984, England and Wales lost 97 per cent of its natural lowland grasslands, the haunt of celandines and the beautiful green-winged orchid. "This is just the tip of the iceberg, though, because we have simply recorded plants as being either present or absent. One plant of a species, even if there were thousands in that area in the previous survey, is still recorded as present. Only if it has died out completely, in the kilometre squares we use for recording, is it noted as a decline." So the real picture is even more bleached of colour than Rich and Woodruff paint, because losses are only recorded as such if a species has died out in its previous location.The findings show a marked reduction in the diversity of our native flowering plants. They have just published their findings.What they discovered was that 195 of England's native flowering plants, and 50 of Scotland's, have decreased substantially in that time. They include many of what were once our most abundant flowers, like the showy yellow marsh ragwort of wet pastures (now drained and ploughed) and the delicate blue pale dog-violet of heathlands (which have been burnt and ploughed, or grown over with scrub)."The cause is mainly habitat loss on a huge scale," says Tim Rich.

Dr Tim Rich and Rosemary Woodruff, until recently at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology's Biological Records Centre near Huntingdon, have compared a vast number of plant records for England and Scotland collected between 1930 and 1960 (most of them in the six years up to 1960) with those collected between 1987 and 1988. The cornucopia of flowering plants to which these habitats were home has disappeared with them. Off the farm, housing and industrial development has destroyed all sorts of habitats, from coastal sand dunes resplendent with the pink flushes of sea bindweed to broad-leaved woods, rich in the garlic odour of ramsons. And plantations of conifers have put paid to many an acre of heather moor glowing dusky red in late summer with bell heather and cross-leaved heath.Only now is the scale of the destruction becoming clear. Flower-full meadows, heaths and pastures have been ploughed, wetlands drained, hedges grubbed out and heather moorland converted to grassland.