Forty thousand seeds and a lot of mud, by Gethin Prosser
An original contemporary magazine article.
The mud of Porth Ysgaw bay has the texture of cold chocolate mousse and the smell of a harbour at low tide. I am kneeling in it, up to my elbows, pushing a hessian bag the size of a teabag into a hole I have made with my thumb. Inside the bag are sand and a dozen seeds of eelgrass, each smaller than a grain of rice. In front of me stretches a grey, glistening plain. Behind me, a line of volunteers is doing exactly the same thing, very slowly, in silence.
‘That’s one,’ says Dr Lowri Pennant, the marine ecologist who leads the project. ‘Only another forty thousand to go this season.’
She is not joking. Seagrass, a flowering plant that lives fully submerged in the sea, once carpeted the shallows of this coast. Old fishermen remember dragging their nets through meadows so thick that the water looked green. Then, over the last century, disease, pollution and the scraping of boat anchors stripped it away. Across the UK, scientists estimate that more than nine tenths of seagrass has been lost. In Porth Ysgaw, what remained by 2015 would have fitted inside a tennis court.
Why should anyone care about a plant most people have never seen? Lowri answers with a list she clearly knows by heart. A healthy meadow shelters young cod, pollack and plaice. It steadies the seabed against storms. It can even bury carbon faster than a forest of the same size. ‘It’s a nursery, a sea wall and a carbon store,’ she says. ‘And we threw it away without noticing.’
Bringing it back is maddening work. Seeds must be collected by hand in late summer, on snorkelling trips to the few surviving patches. They are sorted and counted in a borrowed school laboratory, then stored in carefully managed seawater tanks. In winter they are bagged, one by one, by volunteers who give up their evenings. Then, at the lowest tides of the year, the bags are pushed into the mud, often in the dark, often in sleet. Many will be washed away. Some will be eaten. Of every hundred seeds, perhaps five will become plants.
Five in a hundred. I let the figure sink in, along with my knees.
Yet the volunteers keep coming. Heledd, a seventeen-year-old who joined after a school talk, has planted more than two thousand bags. ‘People say, what’s the point, you’ll never see it finished,’ she tells me, wiping mud off her cheek with a muddier glove. ‘But somebody planted the oak trees I climbed when I was little. They didn’t see them finished either.’
And there are signs that patience pays. At the end of the morning Lowri takes me out in a small boat to the patch planted four years ago. She leans over the side and tells me to look. Beneath the surface, swaying in the current like hair, is a dark green meadow the size of two football pitches. A shoal of tiny fish flickers through it and vanishes.
‘That,’ she says quietly, ‘was mud.’
I go back to my bag of seeds. My hands are numb and my back aches. Only thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and something to go.
Replanting seagrass in Porth Ysgaw bay is described as slow, painstaking work that is worth the effort. How does the writer try to show this?
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