Limestone bank clearing

23 Jan 2025

You can’t win ‘em all, weatherwise - today’s work party was murky and muddy. We took down two bird boxes for cleaning and re-positioning and checked the tree that we will mount our owl box on. Our new tree popper got it’s first outing, and made light work of pulling up random hawthorn and bramble sprouts that had self-seeded in the grassland meadow area.

Then we embraced the mud and got stuck in to removing earth clods and turf from a section of the limestone bank, as per the Management Plan. Jane had already made an excellent start turning back the clods at the top of the slope to slow the spread of grass seed onto the stone. We have sown yellow rattle seed and were careful to remove just the grass, leaving the spring plant shoots to develop. To our enormous relief, Suzanne arrived with cake… :)

Exposing the limestone outcrop here will give the rarer limestone-loving plants a better chance against competition from more common, rank vegetation that otherwise moves in and overwhelms them. This technique has worked really well at the National Stone Centre and we hope to encourage some of the rarer plants that are now growing happily just up the valley. For example, Blackstonia perfoliata, normally a plant of magnesium limestone in the Bolsover area, is now at the NSC growing on a similar habit to the Wild Maple Field limestone bank.

Habitat for Limestone-loving plants

Blackstonia Perfoliata, now growing at the National Stone Centre thanks to sensitive management of limestone habitat.

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