‘A great botanist’s resort’ : Heslington Fields near York, a history of its flora and recorders

Because of the great extent of nature depletion globally (e.g. Cowie et al. 2022, Liu et al. 2025), restoration ecology is necessary for the conservation of wild species and habitats (e.g. Young 2000, Mutillod et al. 2024). Restoration of a site benefits from a reference state, which can serve as a goal towards which restoration can be targeted and against which restoration can be assessed (Aronson et al. 1995, White & Walker 1997, Balaguer et al. 2014). The reference state will commonly be other nearby ‘undamaged’ sites, but, if they exist, historical data on the actual site could, and arguably should, inform the reference state (Higgs et al. 2014, Manzano et al. 2020). Because the duration of anthropogenic influence on a site can be longer than a human generation, one risk when choosing a reference state is that of ‘shifting baselines’ (Pauly 1995, Soga & Gaston 2018, Alleway et al. 2023): a reference state based only on data (or ‘memory’) from the recent past could underestimate the extent of biodiversity loss, because it might have occurred for much longer. This, in turn, can lead to underambitious goals, because the site might once have been much more diverse than people remember. The problem of shifting baselines may be partly mitigated by considering historical data from periods further back in time (e.g. Gatti et al. 2015). In this paper I consider the past flora of a site in the Vale of York subject to current ecological restoration but also continuing ‘development’. Data are considered from the early 19th century, prior to biodiversity loss by enclosure, and subsequent agricultural intensification. I use these data to draw implications for current and future restoration of the ecology of the site.