This two-mile length of footpath on the south bank of the River Tees, from the cataracts at Low Force, westwards towards the thunder of water tumbling over High Force, is one of the most well-trodden sections of the Pennine Way. Today, with the river in full spate after days of heavy rain, most walkers have come to see the waterfalls.
In early summer many visit to admire the display of wild flowers, when orchids, globe flowers, mountain pansies and bird’s-eye primroses border the footpath. I could find only one species of this internationally famous flora, known to botanists as the Teesdale Assemblage, still in bloom on this chilly October afternoon: shrubby cinquefoil (Potentilla fruticosa), one of Britain’s rarest wild flowers.
This knee-high shrub grows wild here, and in a few places on the Cumbrian fells, but nowhere else in Great Britain. Nevertheless, its prolonged display of cheerful yellow flowers is familiar to many, since cultivars grow in countless gardens and often feature in those ubiquitous, nondescript urban amenity plantings that trap wind-blown litter.
Shrubby cinquefoil is “near threatened” and declining as a native species, but secure in cultivation. In this landscape, where leaves and twigs swept down river in the flood and snagged in its branches are the only litter it collects, it leads a precarious existence. It’s hard to imagine how its seeds, roughly the size of strawberry pips, ever manage to find a niche and sink roots into rock fissures, to anchor it in such a turbulent environment, but they have, for millennia.
Here shrubby cinquefoil, surrounded by high Pennine fells, is truly wild, sometimes buried in snow or sheathed in ice in the winter, often submerged when the river becomes a torrent after sudden snow melt in Upper Teesdale in spring.
There could be no better example of why we should strive to conserve plant species in perpetuity in their natural habitat. In a garden, shrubby cinquefoil is just another decorative shrub; here it is part of the story of 10,000 years of postglacial landscape. In the grandeur of these surroundings, with its gnarled and twisted stems, shaped by the elements, it is a botanical epitome of wildness and tenacity.
