Today's Guardian Country Diary is an account of a visit to Hawthorn Hive on the Durham Coast, just south of Seaham. As soon as you start to descend the steep steps down to the beach you leave the cool south-westerley prevailing wind behind and find yourself in a sheltered bay, looking outwards towards the North Sea horizon. Until about thirty years ago the bay was used for dumping colliery waste (you can still detect a whiff of coal and find colliery artifacts, like bits of conveyor belt), but since that stopped it has gradually recovered. The shelter and warmth at the base of the cliffs provides a haven for wild flowers and insects - notably butterflies.
Down at the cliff base the warmth and shelter encourage early flowering and rapid seed development. These downy rose hips were ripe and already beginning to soften.
This is the seed head of a greater knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa) plant. It's particular warm close to the limestone cliffs, thanks to the reflected heat of the sun, and there the dry seed heads open into this star-shaped conformation, releasing the seeds. You can see a couple of seeds, with their pappus of bristles, still there in the centre.
There's a wealth of limestone-loving native wild flowers down on the beach and one notable alien introduction - a massive clump of montbretia (Croscosmia x crocosmiiflora). The parents of this garden hybrid orginated in South Africa. It's a bit of a mystery how the plant reached this bay, which is a long way from the nearest house garden, but it thrives at the base of the cliffs, where the temperature when this photograph was taken must have been close to that of its ancestral home.
Bees visit the montbretia flowers but most of the butterflies, like....
.... this peacock, which was drawn to the knapweed ....
... and this one, feeding on the dense patches of devil's bit scabious just below the cliffs ....
.... feed on the native wild flowers. On this visit we counted 16 species of butterfly, including commas (above), small whites, large whites, green-veined whites, small coppers, common blues, red admirals, peacocks (in large numbers), small tortoiseshells, meadow browns, a single painted lady, wall butterflies, speckled woods, small heaths, ringlets and a large skipper...............................but definitely no heath fritillaries - the photograph of these butterflies that accompanies the piece in the on-line Guardian is pure fantasy on the part of the newspaper's picture editor - there are no heath fritillaries in the north east, or indeed anywhere north of Essex.
There are more accounts of the flora and fauna of Hawthorn Hive at http://cabinetofcuriosities-greenfingers.blogspot.com/search/label/Hawthorn%20Hive
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