Nature heals: visiting a restored seagrass meadow

In 2024 Katherine Knight helped to plant a seagrass meadow on the West coast of Scotland. Two years on she has visited the site and can report that nature is healing...

Recently I donned my mask to see for myself how the meadow that I helped to plant on the West Coast of Scotland would look two years later. What I found really shocked me.

Back when we were carefully transplanting these shoots and hoping that they would one day form of vibrant seagrass meadow, the method of transplanting shoots was untried within the UK. Armed with trowels like underwater gardeners, we planted bundles of 10 shoots with care, spaced out across the area. We hoped that they would thrive and grow, and one day join up to form a full seagrass meadow. The sea is a challenging place and the small shoots would need to make their own way in the world.

Revisiting this restoration area two years later, I was unsure what I would find beneath the waves. Would the seagrass have survived... or would the area have turned back to the barren mud that it was before?

The cold of the March water pushed against my mask as I swam out to the restoration area. A flutter of anxiety and anticipation in my stomach as I was about to find out whether the hard work had paid off. I thought that the restoration area would be obvious, with its more sparsely spread shoots, but what I found was really unexpected. I couldn’t find the restored meadow at all. I double checked the landmarks that we used to locate its position and I was definitely in the right place. Instead of the early signs of a recovering seagrass meadow, there was a lush, green, continuous expanse of seagrass. It was only by spotting a few of the pegs that we’d used in the initial planting that showed that this was the restored seagrass.

It was brilliant to see that the hard work of the dedicated team restoring the meadow had paid off, and that in just a few years an amazing turnaround and recovery could be realised. A great reminder of the power that the ocean has to heal itself when we just give it a helping hand.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can get involved in finding and mapping our seagrass, head over to the Great Seagrass Survey page.