Blooms

If you were enjoying the bluebells in Middleton Woods recently you may have noticed - just here and there - a spray of pure white bells among the blue. Nature occasionally surprises us with these different coloured sports among our familiar flowers. It’s the kind of thing gardeners notice among their garden flowers and perhaps collect the seed for next year, or that horticulturalists over the centuries have exploited to develop new cultivars. Naturalists are interested too, and recently I 've been hearing of some fascinating examples.

A friend was walking along a bridleway at Harewood earlier this spring and enjoying a particularly fine show of wood sorrel. Normally this little plant with its shamrock-shaped leaves and drooping bell flower nestles shyly in damp corners, but here a stretch of bank along the track was white with them for fifty yards or so and, amid the white, was a ten yard section of startling pink. Imagine the cochineal colour of childhood birthday cakes and you’ve got it: the little nodding bells were not flushed but solid, brazen pink. A few stray pink flowers could also be found scattered among the white ones further along the bank. Although they were dramatic, I couldn’t help feeling that the milk-white bells were more suited to the plant’s modest character and also more attractive against the rich green leaves. The same is true of the occasional pale pink form of the lovely lilies of the valley that grow in upper Wharfedale. Their delicate sprays don’t please my eye as much as the creamy white ones do.

Horticulturalists also develop new cultivars by cross breeding, and wild plants do naturally form hybrids, many of which fox amateur botanists like me. We are entering the season when you can see wonderful displays of wild orchids. The dark purply-red (and occasional white) spikes of the Common Spotted are the ones I know best. In Wharfedale we are on the border line of the Southern and Northern Marsh orchids and can find examples of both - and bewilderingly diverse hybrids of all three! Interestingly, the hybrid forms are often the more vigorous, taller, more robust and with more luscious blooms. I’ve given up on the identification and just enjoy the flowers.

If you take a walk along the west bank of the Wharfe from the Cavendish pavilion to the Strid, you can observe this hybridization process in action - among the Avens. Water Avens is a medium sized plant of the strawberry family. Trefoil leaves grow from its stem, and its nodding cup-shaped flowers are a dusky pink. A near relation is Herb Bennet, or Wood Avens, a rather more robust plant with five-petalled yellow flowers that face upwards. Like its cousin, it enjoys shady damp woodland and it readily hybridises. Along your river-side walk you will find plants showing all stages of head-droop and exhibiting a subtle mixed palette of colours. Water avens seem particularly given to mutations too. Our botany expert told me of a site in Middleton where variant forms occur, some with double rings of bright yellow petals and others with ruffs formed by double rings of sepals. This doubling is known by botanists, rather quaintly, as 'hose in hose'.

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