Flora of the Fells: Celebrating Cumbria's Mountain Landscapes

Martin Varley (ed)
�3.95

A lively book which studies the mountain flora of Cumbria and the Lake District - from the alpines in the Helvellyn range, to the rare plants in the Western Lake District.
This book is a colourful celebration of the diversity of species which exist against the odds to provide the area with a beautiful range of flora.

Published by :	Friends of the Lake District and English Nature
Published Date :	2003
Pages :	48
Format :	Large paperback.
Illustrations :	Colour photographs.
ISBN :	9780954050610

Flora of the Fells: Celebrating Cumbria's Mountain Landscapes

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Review

Cumbria has some magnificent mountain landscapes which are well worth celebrating and their plants and flowers help to make them special. I hope that this fascinating account of the flora of the fells, with its superb illustrations, will help to introduce many others to a seldom celebrated aspect of the Cumbrian outdoors. It is a timely reminder of the value of what we still have and why we should work to enhance it. - Sir Chris Bonington, Mountaineer.
Friends of the Lake District and English Nature have joined forces to produce a splendid account of the plantlife of the Cumbrian fells, which should appeal to all outdoor enthusiasts whether residents or visitors. But the raising of awareness of this fragile part of our natural heritage should also be allied with a wish to cherish and respect it and support for conservation measures which promote its recovery. - Dr. Derek Ratcliffe, author of the New Naturalist Lakeland.
I am grateful to the Friends of the Lake District and English Nature for producing this beautifully illustrated book. Through its pages, many will gain an even greater appreciation of this treasured landscape. For the expert it is a fine reminder of old friends and for the novice it will bring happy hours of exploration and discovery. - Chris Collier, Chief Executive, Cumbria Tourist Board.
When we tramp the fells we crush the delicate flowers beneath our feet. We have caused the bare fells to be over-run with constantly nibbling sheep, tearing away in their quietly ferocious and insistent way at the roots of the grass itself. The landscape has been exposed to polluting chemicals from the spoil heaps of ancient mining to the weeping of sulphur rain. And yet flowers of incandescent loveliness still survive.
After the last great ice age twelve thousand years ago, the still harsh mountain landscape was colonised by arctic-alpine flora. They were hardy plants, but unable to compete with the richer plants that came as the climate grew warmer. They were small plants, delicate in appearance, but tenacious in character. And they have held on. The juniper, the dwarf birch and dwarf willow are still to be found on Cumbrian fells, and roseroot, mountain sorrel and purple saxifrage still bloom, largely unseen, on the eastern slopes of Helvellyn and elsewhere.
The heathers came next, with the small sweet fruits that earlier generations loved to collect, the bilberries, cloudberries, cranberries and crowberries. And then as the climate grew modestly warmer, the trees came, first the hardy birch and then hazels, elms and oaks which created a broad-leaved mantle covering the valleys and lower fells.
Five thousand years ago the first farmers began to work the land. The forests were slowly felled and burnt. A few of the ancient woodlands, like the moss-encrusted oaks in Borrowdale, remain, but elsewhere successive generations adapted the landscape to their needs. As the climate became the wetter and cooler one that we are accustomed to, the uplands became bog and their ecology changed yet again.
Today, and for the last two centuries or more the invasive species, sweeping all before it, has been sheep. There is a danger that the activities of man may overwhelm the natural processes even here in our supposedly most wild places. The flora of the fells with its long and living history is also an indicator of the health of Cumbria's mountain landscapes.
When the sheep population was ravaged by foot and mouth two years ago the fellsides flourished. Jeremy Roberts writes of a re-born Cross Fell where "In the endless breeze cotton sedges made billowing white swathes, tall grass heads swayed gracefully and innumerable flowers starred the turf with white, pink and yellow."
The Victorian plant-hunters and botanisers also ravaged the flowers of the fells. One John Balfour, a professor of botany from Edinburgh University, no-less, led a gang of well meaning vandals who stripped the cliffs below Swirral Edge of alpine saxifrage and hawkweed, of purple saxifrage, club mosses and dwarf juniper. Our flora needs a proper respect as well as knowledge.
Flora of the Fells is a hymn of praise and a plea or preservation for our wonderful mountain flora. Martin Varley has compiled and produced the book with the support of The Friends and of the Lake District and English Nature as part of a larger project to promote public understanding and enjoyment of the mountain landscapes of Cumbria through its flora.
The beauty of this book goes a long way to doing just that. The writing is sensitive and informed with ecology, botany and folk-lore and the photographs, whether of the opening flowers themselves or the broadening vistas of our melancholy landscape, tell us that here we have a treasure that must not be lost. - Steve Matthews, Bookcase.

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