WHEN I first started work with Wyre Forest District Council within its Ranger Service things were very different.

For a start there was only one local nature reserve, Redstone Marsh, in Stourport, and the emphasis of the job was on environmental education.

I was, however, very fortunate to have been able to spend some time with the then part-time warden of the Rifle Range/Devil's Spittleful nature reserve, Dave Scott.

Many of you will know Dave as the ranger out on Hartlebury Common.

I can still remember our first meeting out on the "range", where he showed me two of the specialities of that reserve. There were strange folk in hidden clearings in the wood, who were high on glue and ranting and raving at people only they could see.

Fortunately the second was far less scary - it was the pale bluish-grey grass known as "grey hair" grass, the Devil's Spittleful being one of the few places in the world where this grass grows.

A small area of this grass was also found up on the heath at Burlish Top.

In latter years a university student carried out an extensive district-wide search for this rarest of grasses, but these two locations were all that were found.

Fortunately, over the years that have passed, it is the glue sniffers which have disappeared, and not the grey hair grass.

However, things were not looking so good for it a few years ago, particularly up on Burlish Top.

The grey hair grass was isolated to a small area of sandy ground no bigger than my dining-room table, and dense gorse scrub was encroaching from all sides.

Groups of children from Bewdley High School worked hard to cut the gorse back but the prickly nature of it made progress literally, painfully, slow.

Fortunately the purchase and use of the large scale cut and collect machine currently in use on Burlish Top came to the rescue. This machine made short work of the gorse and for the first time the scrub was effectively controlled.

The existing grey hair grass was saved. What was not expected was that the grass discovered it really liked the areas where the scrub had been cut and new plants started to spread out from the original patch.

Now the grey hair grass must have spread over an area of around half a hectare, in which it is more dominant than any of the other grass species.

This spring it even came into flower, creating a lovely spectacle with its almost silver flowering heads waving across the short-cropped heathland landscape.