- Red List 2025: Critically Endangered Species
- Red List 2025: Endangered Species
- Red List 2025: Vulnerable Species
You assume plant conservation means saving exotic cliff rarities.
The 2025 Red List (five years, 30 million records, 1,720 species assessed), reveals something more unsettling. It’s not mountain endemics vanishing.
It’s Campanula rotundifolia (Harebell), down 44%. Briza media (Quaking-grass), now Vulnerable. Thymus drucei (Wild Thyme), officially threatened.
These aren’t rarities; they’re the plants that made British meadows recognisable, that herbalists barely bothered recording because everyone knew them.
One in four native British plants now faces extinction risk. The crisis isn’t dramatic; it’s statistical.
Last August, examining the Red List heatmap, I noticed the pattern. The reddest areas, highest threat concentrations, aren’t remote Scottish peaks.
They’re the southern English chalk downs, the Cambridgeshire fens, the Welsh valleys. Places humans have lived longest.
Where my grandmother gathered cowslips without thinking twice.
Where every field guide assumed you’d find these plants. That red glow marks the ordinary becoming extraordinary.
From measuring conservation by preventing extinction to measuring it by preventing ordinariness from becoming special.
The shift reveals what we’re actually losing: not wilderness, but the gentle, species-rich landscapes created by centuries of traditional management.
What required no thought to find now requires GPS coordinates and nature reserve permits.
Which “common” plant from your childhood have you not seen lately?