Andrew Shaw has a passion for rare British natives, even bringing things back from the dead
WORDS STEPHANIE MAHON PHOTOGRAPHS JOHN CAMPBELL
If someone told you they had raised, say, a dodo, or a dinosaur, you’d find it hard to believe, but Andrew Shaw has done just that – resurrected an extinct species. Founder of the Rare British Plants Nursery, he specialises in cultivating endangered native plants, and last year, he brought York groundsel back from the dead.
Endemic to England, in fact, to York – meaning it only grew there – York groundsel (Senecio eboracensis) could once be found growing wild on wastelands, train tracks, footpaths and car parks around the city. The last-known plant died in 2003, and there were no examples left in cultivation. But Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, did have some 20-year-old seeds in cold storage, which they sent to Andrew and which, miraculously, he got to germinate. And so he brought York groundsel back to life.
You might imagine that the setting for this sort of endeavour is clinical and lab-like, all microscopes, Petri dishes and white coats, but the Rare British Plants Nursery looks like any other nursery: pots in a polytunnel. Its exact location, near Builth Wells in Wales, is a loosely guarded secret. Andrew moved here about 25 years ago, to a 40-acre smallholding with a neat farmhouse and wide-ranging views, where he could indulge his love of natural history.
Andrew trained and worked as an ecologist, advising developers on protected species.
“But botany was my main passion,” he says. “I collected a lot of stuff as I was going about the country, and suddenly people started asking me for a sample of this or that. Before you know it, I’ve got people from Kew and the National Botanic Garden of Wales visiting, and I’m getting asked to do recovery projects. Most botanists don’t grow things – it’s not about cultivation for them, it’s just about identifying plants. Whereas I grow everything I can get my hands on.”
Now his day job involves growing scarce and threatened native plants for habitat restoration schemes, working with wildlife trusts and organisations such as Natural England to restore wild populations.
Another of his recent successes is Beaco
