At the eastern end of the viaduct that carries the Tees railway path across the River Lune there is a hay meadow that starts to flaunt its charms in spring, with a display of starry white meadow saxifrage.
Today, when we leaned over the dry-stone wall, all trace of saxifrage was hidden. Over the past month, summer flowers have grown waist-high; tall enough to hide fledglings of the curlew that landed on the wall on the far side of the field and yelped alarm calls into the buttercups and cow parsley.
North Pennine meadows are famous for their glorious flora, of hay rattle, wood cranesbill, greater burnet, sorrel, melancholy thistle and lady’s mantle, but on this warm, humid afternoon it was the flowering grasses that seemed to epitomise the luxuriance of midsummer.
You really need a magnifying glass to appreciate the intricate modular architecture of their inflorescences. The basic grass floral unit is a tiny floret, with papery bracts, enclosing dangling stamens and feathery stigmas, adapted for shedding and capturing pollen carried on a summer breeze.
In bentgrasses the florets are carried singly on long, slender stalks forming conical, airy panicles. Brome florets are clustered into heavy spikelets that curve languidly downwards. Timothy grass carries a cylinder of short-stalked spikelets, like a cat’s tail, surrounded by a halo of stamens. Elegant variations on a theme, simply by altering the length of floret stalks and the way they join and branch.
Flowering grasses are an ethereal presence, graceful and constantly moving. As we watched, a zephyr passed across the field, trailing a wave in its wake: a gentle genuflection of tall-stemmed, russet flower spikes of meadow foxtail, a shiver through arching inflorescences of bromes, a trembling in the aura of stamens surrounding flower heads of crested dog’s-tail; millions of invisible pollen grains liberated in seconds.
I trailed my fingers in the meadow, picked and crushed a piece of sweet vernal grass and breathed the aroma of coumarin, the smell of new-mown hay. For a day or two after the mowers arrive, this whole field will be heavy with that scent as the windrows dry in the sun.
