Pond plants lay dormant

Over the past decade conservationists have assessed the risk of pond habitats throughout the land and begun taking evasive measures to restore them. They're hotspots for rare plants that in turn drawn in rare insects, which again, then attract bats, birds, and in the long run mammals, it's a true plethora of life that just reap the benefits of fresh water, but digging out new ditches is work intensive and Henrietta's ghost pond has me thinking there might be an easier way. As you can probably hear I'm on the road, leaving Lucy for a while and heading to Boham in north Norfolk to catch up with Carl Sayer, he's leading the one of a kind pond restoration research group at UCL, and also heading up the Norfolk ponds project, that's been alive since 2014. This falls into the same scheme that Lucy is delivering on. Norfolk actually holds more ponds than anywhere else in the UK. So if anyone is gonna be the spectral pond reverend, it'll probably be Carl...

Carl - There's coupons couple hundred meters over there. Short distance.

Harry - Where as on the Buxton's farm, the ponds were muddied with sediment on account of their recent renovation. The bodies of water here amongst the wildflower meadow are beautiful shades of turquoises, almost like that of the Mediterranean sea. You'd be able to see straight through to the bed if it wasn't for all the plant life that has taken root.

Carl - We are looking at two little lenses of water in the ground that are ghost ponds, and you need to know what that is. So a ghost pond is a pond that was lost from the landscape sometime ago. And what you do is you resurrect that ghost pond by digging it out. So you never totally lose them. They're represented by little puddles in the fields and damp patches. If the farm will let you do it, you can dig them out and up will come the water and you'll get a pond again.

Harry - We've got one right in front of us. Can we just pop down slightly closer?

Carl - So you're going over lots of spoil and earth and all sorts of stuff. You've got to remember we did this in September last year. So we've had barely any time for anything to happen, but a lot has happened. So the water here is just full of plants. We can see stone warts, lovely sort of floating pond weeds coming up, white flowering ranunuculus. So the whole pond has got thousands and thousands and thousands of plants. And the only way that's happened is because when we've disturbed the sediment here and sort of opened up this pond, the sediments buried under the field are actually full of living seeds. So even though they're buried under a crop, these seeds can still live. So it is genuinely ghostly.

Harry - And when about this pond last had water in it? How long have these seeds been waiting dormant?

Carl - This pond was marked on a tithe map. We think it probably was around and around about the 1840s. It doesn't appear on any other maps.

Harry - 150 years?

Carl - Yeah. 150 years of probably being lost from the landscape until we brought it back up. So those seeds are very, very old. So I say 150 years, that's the minimum. This could be a very old pond.

Harry - Maybe this is rude of me, but it seems like this has been recently excavated. Do you think it will look, I guess like this for quite a long time, will it take a long time before it gets back to a fully functioning part of the ecosystem?

Carl - Yeah. If I brought you here next year, so you have two years of colonisation, wild colonisation, you would not know we'd done anything. You would have no concept of us, of this being a field with no pond in it. The pond would be truly back,

Harry - I guess then the idea of, as you said, resurrecting these ghost ponds. That must take quite a lot of the effort out of making new ponds because you've already got this sort of Ikea ready made flat pack of a pond ready to spring back to life. It must be quite helpful with the Norfolk pond project that you're apart of?

Carl - So we, first of all, mapped all the ponds in Norfolk and then we mapped all the ponds that had been lost. So there's 23,000 ponds that exist, but at least eight to 10,000 that were lost, that are buried. So, you know, you can go and dig new ponds, which is great, but why not dig out the old ponds where they used to be? And then you've got this guaranteed wonderful sort of ancient seed bank effect. And the absolute beauty of it is that it brings back species, which are incredibly rare in the landscape. So we've had plants come back in ponds that were thought to be extinct in Norfolk or even a pond in Suffolk where a plant had come back that hadn't been seen in the whole of the British Isles for about 60 years.

Harry - What's the plant?

Carl - It's a stonewart, which is what you're looking at here a beautiful, elegant stonewort called slimy fruited stonewort.

Harry - It's a good name.

Carl - Yeah, it doesn't sound very nice, but it's absolutely beautiful.

Harry - Carl said that during the excavations they found the remains of ice skates fashion from old bones dating back centuries. He believes this site in the winter would have filled with water and cover the surrounding land. And now that the ponds have been restored, it's likely that that old process will begin to happen once again. So armed with all this knowledge, Carl turns to me and says he has a challenge in mind.

Carl - What you gotta do now is find your own ghost pond. So let's head back, and I'll explain to you how you find one.