ON Sunday, the BBC’s Countryfile programme is due to visit Dr Margaret Bradshaw, the 97-year-old botanist from Eggleston, to discuss the “Teesdale assemblage” – the unique collection of Alpine plants that, due to a quirk of geology and climate, are found only in upper Teesdale.
Dr Bradshaw, who still rides a horse about the upper dale in search of plants, has recently written a book containing her lifetime of observations about Teesdale’s flowers, and the TV visit coincides with the flowering of the Spring Gentian, the brilliant blast of blue that is only visible from mid-May to early June and which is the flower emblem of County Durham.
Construction of Cow Green Reservoir in the late 1960s with the Tees still flowing on its original course
The rare plants are in serious decline – the Gentian is down 54 per cent in 50 years – and Countryfile will touch on the creation of Cow Green Reservoir in the 1960s, which Dr Bradshaw and David Bellamy campaigned against because it covered so much of the dale’s unique landscape in which the rare flora flourished.
The Spring Gentian is the county flower of Durham
Botanists have been aware of the specialness of Teesdale for more than 200 years, and most books – including Dr Bradshaw’s – credit Reverend John Harriman with being the first to spot the Gentian on July 27, 1796.
But botanists have suspicions about the reverend and his “unscrupulous” bids to pass off other people’s botanical discoveries as his own.
He arrived in the dale from Cumbria in 1788 as a curate at Barnard Castle, where he took up the study of lichens. This brought him into contact with the nationally renowned Darlington botanist, Edward Robson.
In 1796, Harriman moved to take a new curacy at Eggleston – his beautiful chapel remains in ruins in the grounds of the Eggleston Hall nursery – and immediately began sending Robson remarkable specimens, including the “new” Gentian. Robson moved them onto his national contacts, and Teesdale’s name was made.
The tomb at the front of the Reverend John Harriman, the lichenologist who is credited with discovering the Spring Gentian, in Croft churchyard
After a few years, Harriman moved on to be curate of Gainford, Heighington, Croxdale and Satley before retiring to Croft-on-Tees, where he died in 1831. He’s buried in a large box tomb as befits an eminent botanist – he has a lichen, Harrimanni, named in his honour.
But it is now thought that he went once out onto the fell, on July 27, 1796, when he picked the Gentians leaves.
Dr Margaret Bradshaw "botanising" on her horse Sigma in the upper dale
He went botanising that day with William Oliver, the apothecary-surgeon of Middleton-in-Teesdale, who had been studying the flora since arriving in the remote village in 1783. As a doctor, his rounds would have taken him to all corners of the dale, and as an apothecary, he would always have been on the look-out for unusual plants from which he could make new potions.
Indeed, he was assisted John Binks, a leadminer and simpler. As a leadminer, Binks would have known where all the unusual plants grew because the flora indicated what minerals might be found below the surface, and as a “simpler”, Binks provided apothecaries with plants for medicinal use – a “simple” was a potion with a single active plant ingredient.
So it seems that it was Oliver who was really the first to spot the Gentian, perhaps aided by the knowledge of local men like Binks, but as he didn’t make a song and dance about it, the glory goes to Harriman, the lichen lover.
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