Counting flowers
By: Isabel Hardman
Tags: Cumbria, Flowers, Nature, Photography, Landscape

This column first appeared in the May 2018 issue of Cumbria Life. All photos copyright Isabel Hardman.

‘Excuse me, I’m being proper nosy, but are you checking up on all the flowers?’ A fellow Walney resident was peering at me, looking more than a little concerned. She had clearly been keeping an eye on me as I meandered very slowly and deliberately over the meadow that looks out over the Irish Sea, examining the ground. My explanation probably didn’t give her any less cause for concern: I wasn’t checking up on all the flowers, but just looking for one, the Walney Geranium. I was trying to count how many there were in bloom, I said, and had been counting for the past hour and a half.

Why was I bothering to count flowers? And what is the Walney Geranium anyway? Oddly, not many Walneyites know what it is. When I moved to this wonderful island in the summer of 2016, one of the first things I discovered was that it had its own variety of wild geranium. Everyone seemed to know where it grew, but every time I turned up at one of the suggested spots, I found a Common Mallow, or the geranium’s more common relative, the Bloody Cranesbill.

It took me a year to track the plant down, and boy was it worth it. Geranium sanguineum var. striatum (formerly var.lancastriense) only grows on Walney and has much paler pink petals than its relative. Those petals are streaked with deep reddish-pink veins. When I showed one of the children in my family the bloom, she said ‘it looks like a jellyfish’, and there is something rather other-worldly about it. Bigger Bank on Walney, where it has its stronghold, turns magenta in the summer when the Bloody Cranesbills open, but among those common wild flowers are those paler pink petals, and I make it my business now to keep an eye on them.

This being Walney, though, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, my flower inspections don’t go unnoticed, which is how I ended up chatting to my ‘proper nosy’ new friend. Walneyites are as friendly as they come, and have made me feel ever so welcome, despite the fact that I have an obviously London rather than Barrow accent, and despite the fact that they often stumble across me inspecting their local flora. My new friend didn’t just quiz me on my botanical prowlings, but also told me about a seal who likes to turn up at 4pm at high tide on the west shore. I took my partner’s children there a few weeks later, and there he was, bobbing up and down on the waves, staring at us thoughtfully with his wide eyes.

Walneyites are very proud of their island, and see themselves as quite different from those who live on the other side of the channel. To me, the Walney Geranium symbolises that unique character, as well as the island’s utter beauty. But my wild adventures naturally take me much further afield than the long wiggly island that I now call home. I am a newcomer to this county, and my work in Westminster as a political journalist means I am only here at weekends and for the parliamentary recesses (and, if I’m honest, as many Thursdays and Fridays as I can manage to work from home, as I prefer working with the sound of Oyster Catchers fretting about on the channel outside my window), but I never want to leave, and I know that even when I can call myself an oldcomer, I will never have got to the end of Cumbria.

I found the Walney Geranium while I was on sick leave from work, having had a mental breakdown in 2016 that it has taken me quite some time to recover from. To try to improve my sanity during some pretty dark days, I would force myself to go for a walk every day and note down all the wild flowers that I found. There are so many coastal specialists growing right outside my front door that I would quickly build a long list of sea campions, see beets, perennial sow thistles and blue fleabanes, and all the while I would be slowly whittling down the bad thoughts that my illness kept throwing at me. Soon, I started driving or cycling to different places where I knew I might find bee orchids (Hodbarrow, near Millom), or the coral root orchid (Sandscale Haws, though it took a couple of hours to trek across the dunes with a Kindly warden who showed me). The satisfaction that I felt with each new plant find helped to lift me just a little. It also taught me how rich the world is, and how it is so worth sticking around to see as much as possible of it. I know this sounds rather trite, as I have a wonderful family, a fascinating job and superb friends, but sometimes those things can feel rather complicated when you are seriously ill. I can’t always think of the people I love without feeling guilty that by having post-traumatic stress disorder, I am letting them down in all sorts of ways. Nature is simpler: it has always been there, and it will outlive me too. It is one of those simple pleasures that have such power.