Can the cloning saxifrage outwit our herbicides?

Five centuries ago the White Canons, who worshipped in the Premonstratensian abbey, whose ruins sit high above the bend in the Tees at Egglestone, would have been familiar with the view that appeared as we crossed the pack-horse bridge.

The pasture had buttercups and another flower that I couldn’t immediately identify. It was only when we stood among the densely packed drifts of its white blooms that it dawned on me that this was meadow saxifrage, in greater profusion than I had ever seen.

To 16th-century travellers, on their way to the abbey, it would have been an unremarkable sight; today it is a window into a lost landscape.

This exquisite wild flower, whose petals remind you of the finest porcelain, has been relentlessly reduced in range and abundance by the agricultural improvement of pastures. It takes just a few cycles of fertiliser application, to boost grass growth, and a few doses of herbicide, to eliminate thistles, for this wiry stemmed beauty to fall as collateral damage, to be banished to field margins or slopes that are too steep to cultivate.

Meadow saxifrage leaf rosettes expand early March before the grasses grow tall enough to shade them out. By July the seeds are set and the plant almost disappears. Not quite, though, because down among the grassroots lies the secret of its abundance in unimproved pastures.

Tiny vegetative buds, called bulbils, form in the leaf axils and then drop to the soil surface, so where one plant grows 10 more can spring up the following year. Bulbils clinging to mud on cattle hooves are planted as the cows move about. This is a plant that clones itself. Unmolested, it can produce spectacular displays that call to mind a late spring snowfall.

Can it be that these blooms, many of which would have been clones of previous years’ plants, are exact genetic copies of saxifrages that were here even before the White Canons trod this path? If so, they could be the oldest individual plants in the landscape. Pure speculation, but I’d like to think that it was true.

Twitter: @seymourdaily