Rosemary Parslow’s knowledge of the natural world was incredibly diverse. Conservation Director for the Wildlife Trust BCN in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rosemary had started her career as a trainee at the Natural History Museum, where new recruits worked in various departments, gaining an amazingly broad introduction to the wealth of wildlife. 

Although most well known as a botanist, Rosemary was an accomplished ornithologist too. She had travelled both professionally and personally through Europe and further east. At one point the Northamptonshire office of the Trust became the sorting office for British members of the Ornithological Society of the Middle East, with boxes of their publications coming in and out regularly.

An early job for the Nature Conservancy Council found Rosemary weighing seal pups as part of a monitoring programme for canine distemper. Responding to a somewhat naïve comment that it must have been a delightful job, she pointed out that not only was the stench of fish overpowering and impossible to shift for days, but every pup had a very large, angry mother keen to crush the poor conservationist who had separated her from her offspring.

After the NCC became English Nature, Rosemary was responsible for the designation of many of the most important Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Northamptonshire. This gave her an encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural history of the county. Many of the sites she helped through the protection system are still thriving as a direct result.

Not everyone whose land was being designated was so keen. The then owner of Bugbrooke Meadows, of which part is now a Wildlife Trust nature reserve, is reported to have sent 12 pages of objection, but when Rosemary rang him to discuss it, he apologised profusely saying he assumed “someone else would have to deal with it”. Similarly, a row with the owner of a railway cutting in South Northamptonshire may have contributed to 10 years’ worth of manure from chicken sheds being deposited on site, but thanks to the designation the best areas have survived, and a restoration process is now underway.

Equally, Rosemary’s enthusiasm for the restrictions that came through SSSI designation weren’t always shared by the staff of other conservation organisations. There was a period where word would go round about Rosemary’s impending holidays, and other NE staff would find themselves with a suspicious number of requests to fell trees or use herbicides landing just as Rosemary went on leave. When she turned poacher for the Trust, she went on to be just as frustrated by her successors of course.

Even before she joined the Trust’s staff, Rosemary had an involvement in the Wildlife Trusts as she was married to then Director of the Wildlife Trust for Northamptonshire, Adrian Colston. This wasn’t always glamorous. The Trust’s then headquarters, still one of our offices, were at Lings House, an isolated old farmhouse in a wood surrounded by some of Northampton’s most deprived housing estates. When local kids decided to break all the windows of the house with stones one evening, Rosemary and Adrian slept in the building overnight before a glazier could come and replace all the windows.

Years later, Rosemary arrived at Lings House to run a workshop on basic wild plant identification. Due to an emergency, the member of staff intending to open the office up couldn’t get there. Unperturbed, Rosemary ran the course on the grassland in front of the office, using the books from her car, for as long as she could until the lack of facilities became an insurmountable problem.

During her tenure at the Trust Rosemary saw some 20 new nature reserves come under our protection. Many staff were involved in the acquisition of Old Sulehay Nature Reserve, for example, but Rosemary’s knowledge of the woodlands, quarrys and surrounding farmland were a huge factor in persuading Trustees that the site was worth the considerable effort required to secure it. In the early days of the National Lottery, the Wildlife Trusts persuaded the lottery’s Trustees that they could have a dramatic effect on wildlife conservation nationally through the local Trusts, and Rosemary oversaw an application that made a major investment in the Trust’s ability to manage its nature reserves.

When Rosemary and Adrian moved house after he took up the post of Property Manager at Wicken Fen, they asked for help to move some of their belongings. Emptying the freezer reportedly proved difficult, as alongside the short-eared owl with one wing (the other having been ‘lent’ to an ornithological artist to help with a book) and a badger overdue to be sent off for analysis, there was a small bag of moles. Rosemary had been storing up any dead moles she’d been able to come across until she had enough to make a pair of moleskin gloves.

The Guardian’s obituary of Rosemary covers her many accomplishments beyond the Trust, including the New Naturalist and Flora covering the Isles of Scilly. They don’t mention that Rosemary’s early frustrations with emerging technology came to a head when she discovered that saving her magnum opus as “Document1” might have unfortunate consequences.

Rosemary was a pleasure to work for, and she consciously invested in developing conservation skills in her junior colleagues. She will be sorely missed.

Written by Matt Jackson, Conservation Director for the Trust