Insect Fuelling Station

Butterbur is in full flower all along the banks of the river Wear, where its creeping rhizomes thrive in silty soil left by winter floods. They're often buried to a considerable depth by silt after floods but the starch food reserves in the rhizomes provide the energy needed for early growth before the flowers and leaves force their way up into the light, in much the same way that colt'sfoot's rhizome food reserves allow it to tolerate burial. Butterbur is a plant that seems to be sensitive to winter climate because after very mild winters - of the kind we experienced for a decade before the most recent - it will often begin to produce leaves at the same time as flowers, but after severe winters, like the last, it reverts to its normal behaviour and delays producing any leaves until flowering is well underway. When they finally expand the leaves are spectacularly large, but before that happens the flowers are an excellent food source for insects in spring....

.... when bees visit for pollen and nectar....

.... and the nectar is an irresistible lure of newly-emerged peacock butterflies.

Butterbur exists as separate male and female plants, with their creeping rhizomes forming very large clonal, single gender patches. In some parts of England only male clones are present but here in the North East we have both sexes. The plants at the top of this post are males but the females (immediately above) are easy to spot because once they've been pollinated their stems elongate very rapidly and within a week or two they begin to produce large numbers of tiny plumed seeds. They do seem to expand their leaves more readily than the males, presumably because of the need to supply sugars to the developing seeds once the bees and butterflies have done their work.