'It gives you tingles' Seed project aims to restore UK's lost seagrass meadows

It is a much-loved stretch of Celtic coastline, revered by poetry lovers as the place where Dylan Thomas lived his final years and by thrillseekers as a spot for breaking land speed records.

- Steven Morris

Now between Thomas's boathouse home at Laugharne and the natural fast track of Pendine Sands in south-west Wales, an ambitious project will try to help restore one of the world's most important and threatened habitats: seagrass meadows.

Two species of seagrassflowering plants that live in shallow, sheltered bays, provide a vital habitat for seahorses, octopuses and cuttlefish, and are an important carbon sink - are being grown in ponds fed with seawater pumped in from Carmarthen Bay.

Over the past two years, what is being billed as the UK's first large-scale seagrass nursery has processed 1.5m seeds collected from sites in Wales and England and grown tens of thousands of plants, the first of which have been introduced into the wild to restore underwater meadows.

The nursery lead, Emily Yates, said: "When we started this, I stood in the polytunnel and thought: 'I can't wait until we're creating meadows of seagrass. When you plant those seeds for the first time, you just hope they grow. And they have, and the first are now out there now creating new meadows, and biodiversity is coming back to places that have been bare, barren sand."