The Many Faces of the Mountain Pansy

Delighted to find that there were scores of mountain pansies Viola lutea still in flower beside the Pennine Way near High Force in Teesdale today, This is a plant with a long flowering season - the first I saw in bloom were open way back in April.

Mountain pansy has an amazing range of flower colours and markings. All four of these forms were flowering within a metre of each other. The pure yellow form is the most uncommon but the rarest is a pure white form that I've only seen on a couple of occasions, in Weardale.

Several of these plants were flowering around rabbit burrows in close-grazed grass, so it seems that rabbits don't eat them.

Teesdale in early June.........

In early June the meadows in the middle part of the dale, around Middleton-in-Teesdale, are full of buttercups, while...

... the hawthorn blossom beside the riverbank footpaths is just past its peak.

In the middle of the river this fledgling dipper has been parked on a stone by its parents that are away collecting food, though it looks like it could feed itself.

This young rabbit was using a coltsfoot leaf for cover but ....

... it would have done better to run for the dense stand of butterbur leaves that could hide a hundred rabbits.

Upstream of Middleton-in-Teesdale, on the way to Bowlees, there are globe flowers blooming on the riverbank, alongside the white umbels of pignut.

You can hear a spotted flycatcher's beak snap shut when it catches a fly ..... and there are plenty of those around, including .....

... dungflies that are plentiful wherever there is livestock grazing in the fields and ....

..... empid flies that use nectaries of wood crane'sbill flowers are fuel stations.

The wet weather hasn't been kind to bees and this little solitary bees resting on an oak leaf looked bedraggled. Can anyone help with an ID? 

Hay rattle is coming into bloom in the hay meadows .....

..... and mountain pansy Viola lutea is flowering well. The epithet lutea means yellow but pure yellow pansies are in the minority - most have variable amounts of purple in their petals and this has a hint of it in the petal tips.

Mountain pansies

We made the long, steep, breathless climb up the northern fellside from St.John’s Chapel today, almost to the top of Black Hill. The views back across Weardale to Chapel Fell were stunning, we were accompanied by the bubbling calls of curlews during most of the ascent and as an added bonus heard our first cuckoo of spring in a pine plantation, about 500 metres above sea level. There are plenty of nesting meadow pipits on these fells for it to parasitise. Apart from bird song, the only sound when you reach the top is the wind. Otherwise, silence. But the purpose of the climb wasn’t to admire the views, seek solitude or listen to the birds, but to see if the first mountain pansies were in flower. And they were. It’s hard to imagine a bleaker landscape than the tops of these fells, where most of the vegetation is still brown and withered after a hard winter, but from mid-April onwards thousands of these delightful flowers decorate the short turf wherever there is a little shelter, turning it into a natural rock garden. Currently they are just about the only flowers in bloom at this altitude. Search amongst them and you can find every flower colour, from deep purple through yellow to pure white, sometimes with all three colours on different petals of a single flower. Well worth the climb.