The law on wild plants

If you're going to go out and about looking at, examining and identifying wild plants, it's important to understand what you can and can't do under the law. The law in this respect differs in England and Wales on the one hand and in Scotland on the other. This blog describes the law in England and Wales.

The main piece of legislation is the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 ("WACA"). WACA creates numerous restrictions on what you can do with wild plants generally and with specific species. Broadly, WACA contains restrictions on the following activities:

• Picking, uprooting and destroying wild plants (section 13(1))
• Selling wild plants or advertising them for sale (section 13(2))
• Releasing certain restricted plants into the wild (section 14(2))
• Selling certain restricted plants or facilitating their sale (section 14ZA(1))
• Advertising certain restricted plants for sale (section 14ZA(2))
• Growing, releasing into the wild, selling or transporting "invasive alien species of Union concern" (section 14AA(1))

The restrictions differ subtly from each other, but one thing they all have in common is that it is a criminal offence to contravene them. It is, therefore, useful, if not important, to understand precisely what each one does. The restrictions are written in legalese and can be quite difficult to decipher. The purpose of this page is to try and explain how they work and what you can't and can't do.

Picking, uprooting and destroying wild plants

Section 13(1) of WACA creates two similar but separate restrictions.

• It is illegal to intentionally pick, uproot or destroy any wild plant listed in Schedule 8 to WACA (section 13(1)(a)).
• It is illegal to intentionally uproot any other wild plant unless you are an authorised person (section 13(1)(b)).

Authorised person means the owner or occupier of the land in question, or a person authorised by any of various official bodies, including a local authority or the Environment Agency.

If we compare these two provisions, we can see they create two "tiers" of restriction depending on whether the wild plant is listed in Schedule 8 to WACA.

• If the wild plant is listed in Schedule 8, you can't pick it, uproot it or destroy it, whoever you are.
• If the wild plant is not listed in Schedule 8, you can pick it or (presumably if there is a good reason) destroy it, whoever you are, but you can't uproot it unless you are an authorised person.

So what is a "wild plant?" A wild plant is one that:

• is growing wild; and
• is of a kind that ordinarily grows in Great Britain in a wild state.

Unhelpfully, WACA doesn't tell us what "growing wild" and "in a wild state" mean, so we need to use our common sense. A plant is clearly not "growing wild" if it grows in your garden, but it will be if it is growing in an open meadow or woodland. The position is probably less clear if the plant is growing in, say, a paddock or a private meadow.

To be a "wild plant", both of these these conditions must be satisfied.

So, a plant which ordinarily grows in a wild state in Great Britain, such as the common bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), the common daisy (Bellis perennis) or the dandelion (Taraxacum spp.), is not a wild plant when it occurs in your garden, and so you can pick it, uproot it and replant it, or simply mow it down. This is the case whether or not the plant is listed in Schedule 8.

Conversely, a plant that does not ordinarily grow in a wild state in Great Britain, such as French/Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas) or Argentinian vervain (Verbena bonariensis), is not a wild plant even when it is growing wild and, again, you can pick it, uproot it or destroy it. Of course, the difficulty is knowing which plants "ordinarily" grow wild in Great Britain and which don't, so you need to be careful. You should assume that the plants listed in Schedule 8 all ordinarily grow wild in Great Britain and so leave them alone when they are in fact growing wild.

This gives us the following basic principles:

• If a plant is not growing wild, you can pick it, uproot it or destroy it. If it is not on your own land, however, you will need the landowner's permission.
• If a plant is growing wild and is listed in Schedule 8, you must not pick it, uproot it or destroy it. You can touch and handle it, but do not damage it.
• If a plant is growing wild and is not listed in Schedule 8, you can pick it and (though you would not want to) destroy it. If it does not ordinarily grow wild in Great Britain, you can also uproot it. If it does ordinarily grow wild in Great Britain, you can uproot it if it is on your land; otherwise, you cannot uproot it unless you are an authorised person.

"Picking" and "uprooting"

You also need to know precisely what you can do with a wild plant when you find it. WACA doesn't define destroying a wild plant, but it's pretty obvious what this means and you wouldn't want to do this anyway unless you're having a pretty bad day.

Uprooting is fairly straightforward as well. It means digging a plant up or "otherwise removing it" from the land on which it is growing. So, this includes yanking it out of the ground such that its roots come out with it.

Picking means gathering or plucking any part of a plant without uprooting it. The words "any part" are important. Picking is not limited to severing a plant at its stem and taking it away to put in a pot on the mantelpiece. Removing even a single leaf, petal or fruit from a plant counts as "picking".

Schedule 8 wild plants

As we have seen, if a plant is listed in Schedule 8 is growing in the wild, you cannot pick it (not even a single petal), uproot it or destroy it. If you do, you will be committing a criminal offence. Put simply, you can touch, handle and inspect it, but you should leave it undisturbed.

The purpose of this restriction is to protect the more vulnerable wild species in Great Britain. This borne out when we look at which wild plants are protected by Schedule 8.

For details of the plants listed in Schedule 8, see here.