It is sometimes forgotten that English people draw part of their identity from the beauty of nature. Many English counties have their own special plant or flower, for example – the white and red roses of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the oak of Surrey, the Worcestershire pear tree.

Our industrial towns also once recruited their working populations from a surrounding hinterland of farms and villages and were intimately connected with the countryside through family and cultural ties. Pride of place was central to civic identity; a connection with nature was fought for as a common good, for example in the mass hill trespasses of the 1930s and 40s.

When I began work on a project to protect some of Britain's rarest wild flowers in the 1990s, the bones of this tradition were still in place. The English county remained an important organising principle for the conservation movement.