Wild Flowers of the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales — A Season-by-Season Guide

The short version: the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales have almost completely different flowers, and the reason is the rock beneath them. The Lakes sit on acidic volcanic and slate geology — bluebells, foxgloves, heather, bog plants. The Dales sit on limestone, which is alkaline and lime-rich, producing a completely different and much showier flora: orchids, rockroses and the flower-crammed hay meadows the Dales are famous for.

Spring — the daffodils and the woodland floor

Wild daffodil — the one everybody comes for, and almost nobody recognises. The true native wild daffodil is noticeably smaller than a garden daffodil, with a deep yellow trumpet against distinctly paler, creamier outer petals. It grows in drifts in damp woodland and along lake shores. Wordsworth's daffodils were these, on the shore of Ullswater — not the fat, uniform, bright-yellow cultivars planted along modern roadsides.

Bluebell — carpeting the oak and hazel woodland from late April into May. Britain holds a very large share of the world's bluebells, which makes the display a genuinely internationally significant thing rather than merely a pretty one. Look for the native's drooping, one-sided flower spike and the creamy-white pollen; the invasive Spanish bluebell stands up straight and has blue pollen.

Wood anemone, wood sorrel, primrose, ramsons — the rest of the spring woodland cast. Ramsons (wild garlic) you will usually smell before you see. Wood anemone is a reliable indicator of ancient woodland: it spreads so slowly — a matter of feet per century — that a good carpet of it means the wood has been there a very long time.

Summer — the meadows and the limestone

This is where the Dales pull decisively ahead. The traditional hay meadows of Swaledale and Wharfedale, cut late and never fertilised, can carry over a hundred flowering species in a single field — a habitat Britain has otherwise lost almost entirely. We have written about them at length in Yorkshire Dales Hay Meadows.

Yellow rattle is the keystone: a semi-parasite that attacks the roots of grasses, weakens them, and lets the flowers get a look in. Where yellow rattle thrives, the meadow is rich. Alongside it: wood crane's-bill (large, purple, a northern speciality), melancholy thistle (a thistle with no prickles, which surprises people), pignut, meadow buttercup, great burnet and devil's-bit scabious.

On the limestone grassland and pavement above the meadows: common rockrose (bright yellow, low, sprawling), bird's-eye primrose (pink, delicate, a northern limestone speciality found almost nowhere else in England), common spotted orchid and northern marsh orchid, and mountain pansy on the old lead-mining ground.

In the grikes — the deep fissures of the limestone pavements — grows something odd: woodland plants. Hart's-tongue fern, dog's mercury, herb-Robert, even the occasional small tree, all sheltering in the cool damp cracks as though the woodland that once stood above them had retreated underground. In a sense, it did.

Late summer — heather and the fells

In the Lakes, August and early September bring heather into bloom on the drier fellsides and the eastern moors, turning whole hillsides purple. Three species are involved and they are worth telling apart: bell heather (deep magenta, on the driest ground), ling (paler, mauve, the commonest), and cross-leaved heath (pink, clustered, on the wet ground).

Bilberry carpets the fellside beneath the heather — small, dark, sharp-tasting berries in late summer, and the reason for purple-stained fingers on any August walk. Foxglove stands in bold pink spires along walls, tracks and cleared woodland, spectacular and entirely poisonous.

On the wet ground: cotton grass, nodding white across the bog and one of the most characteristic sights of the uplands; bog asphodel, yellow, turning deep orange as it goes over; and sundew, a tiny insect-eating plant that lives on the bog surface and catches midges on sticky red hairs. That last one is worth going to your knees for.

The rarities

Arctic-alpine flora — the Lake District's genuine botanical treasure. On the high, ungrazeable crags — Helvellyn is the classic — grow plants that are otherwise found in the Arctic and the Alps: purple saxifrage (flowering astonishingly early, sometimes in March, on bare rock), alpine lady's-mantle, roseroot, alpine cinquefoil. These are Ice Age relics, stranded on the cold high ledges when the glaciers retreated and the rest of Britain warmed up around them. They survive precisely because sheep cannot reach them.

Lady's-slipper orchid — the most famous flower in the Dales, and for most of the twentieth century the rarest plant in Britain, reduced to a single wild plant kept under permanent guard. A reintroduction programme has slowly, painstakingly brought it back to a handful of protected sites. It is Britain's most spectacular native orchid and its story is the most dramatic in British botany.

Baneberry and angular Solomon's-seal — scarce limestone specialities of the Dales woodlands, found in very few other places in England.

Frequently asked questions

Sources & further reading

• Plantlife — wild plant conservation
• Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland
• Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority
• Cumbria Wildlife Trust