SANDY soils around Kidderminster have led us to have some superb lowland heath nature reserves like The Devil’s Spittleful and Rifle Range, Burlish Top and Hartlebury Common. These sandy soils also give us another unusual and now rare habitat known as lowland acid grassland.

The term acid is just a reflection that this particular type of grassland can only be found growing on soils with a low acid ph, like the sandy soils we find around Kidderminster. For many years now acid grasslands have been a forgotten wildlife resource, as unlike the much more flower rich neutral and calcareous grassland meadows, acid grasslands have fewer species of flower associated with them.

Given the Wyre Forest district’s importance for lowland acid grassland and heath species it would only seem prudent to try and find as many of these acid grasslands as possible and, through the planning process, try to ensure what remains continues to exist. We also need to see if documents like the proposed Wyre Forest Green Infrastructure can join these remaining patches together to form viable acid wildlife corridors, through which these unique communities can travel, mix and thrive.

It can’t have been that long ago when huge chunks of the land around Kidderminster would have been acid grassland so it was not too surprising to find that some good patches of this habitat still exist. Many of the district’s road verges are good, but the best discovery to date has to be Brinton’s park in Kidderminster itself.

This year Wyre Forest District Council’s parks section changed its management of this park in some areas to a much less formal regime and in some of these areas it has allowed a long suppressed acid grassland flora to re-emerge on the sandy soils of this park. Acid grassland are typified by the fine leaved grasses that grow on them and a few different typical species could be seem flourishing in abundance in the park.

Among these there was the delicate wavy hair grass with its purple stems and almost silvery flowers and the much more robust common bent with its deep grey/green tufts of leaves. Among these grasses broad leaf plants like sheep’s sorrel with its rusty red flowerheads and the white cloud-like flowers of heath bed straw can be found.

Given this is such a relatively new change of management it is still early days for this acid grassland.

However, given the fact that Brinton Park is not far away from some of the district’s finest examples of this habitat and that the parks section is keen to help it to continue to thrive, surely it will not be long before one of our best loved urban parks will be helping to conserve one of the country’s rarest wildlife habitats.