#10 Teesdale Violet by Howard Beck
Meet Howard Beck, freelance writer, photographer, and volunteer botanist!
Howard was born in Leeds in 1947 and has always had a love of nature and the great outdoors. He has travelled the world extensively but always returns to his beloved Yorkshire Dales. For the past fifty years he has explored the region as a walker, climber, potholer, cyclist, and latterly, as a keen amateur botanist. For over thirty years, Howard has worked as a freelance writer and photographer and has been a regular contributor to Dalesman, Yorkshire Ridings and many other local and national magazines. He has published several books including Wordsworth’s Lake District (Blurb, 2013) and Wild Flowers of Yorkshire (Crowood Press, 2010). In 2018 he became a member of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) and the following year he was signed up as a volunteer botanist with Natural England, working on the Ingleborough National Nature Reserve (NNR) out of the Colt Park Office. Howard can be contacted via email at infinite_blue123@proton.me.
Howard’s chosen species is the Teesdale Violet Viola rupestris. Teesdale Violet is a perennial herb that produces small rosettes, often a fraction of the size of a 5p coin. Unlike its most common bedfellow Common Dog-violet (V. riviniana), the leaves of Teesdale Violet have a rounded apex, blunt crenellations, and turn up at the leaf margins to give a distinctive garden trowel shape. Its petioles (the stalks that join the leaf to the stem) are generally covered in a fuzz of short hairs that lend it a grey appearance when observed with the naked eye. Being cleistogamous, the species rarely flowers, instead self-pollinating from within the closed capsule. It favours short, stony turf and scree on calcareous soils. The NBN atlas page for this species is not well-populated, due to the relatively scarcity of this plant.
Viola rupestris in flower showing garden trowel shape of leaves.
Howard chose this species because of its relationship with the Ingleborough NNR. Since the species was first discovered there in 1976, records have been few and scattered. It was in 2018, when Howard became a volunteer botanist working on the reserve, that his attention was brought to this small but lovely plant.
Teesdale Violet is a nationally scarce plant. Known from only four locations in the whole of Britain, this makes our population in Yorkshire especially important for its conservation. It also makes it especially important to Howard, Yorkshire being his home county!
Owing to its scarcity, it is a IUCN Red Data Book species, meaning it is endangered or rare, with a status of Least Concern. First identified in Britain in Teesdale (1862), giving the plant its name, the population there is declining compared to the stable and thriving population hosted here in Yorkshire by Ingleborough, which was first recorded in 1976. Since then, records in the area have been few and scattered. Additionally, in the 1970s, some 10% of the Teesdale population was lost when the Cow Green Reservoir was flooded, making the Ingleborough population all the more important.
“Since I took upon myself to survey the species it has grown in significance within my sensibilities. I have lived, slept and dreamed Teesdale Violet. For the past two years the species has dominated my life.”
It was Christmas 2018 when the then senior reserve manager of Ingleborough NNR, Colin Newlands, first raised Howard’s awareness to the existence of Teesdale Violet in the area. Colin was also dangling a juicy and very large carrot on a stick when he told Howard that no one was aware how widespread the species was on the reserve. It was a shortcoming that could only be addressed if someone was willing to carry out a detailed survey…and in stepped Howard. Since then, it has grown in significance for him considerably. He has ‘lived, slept, and dreamed Teesdale Violet’, with it dominating his life for the past two years through his role as a dedicated volunteer botanist.
At the time, Howard had only recently become a Natural England volunteer and was seeking a project in which to immerse himself, so he set about organising. Initial planning focused on how best to go about a survey covering such a large area - 1000 hectares across the Ingleborough region. This reserve is split into 40 compartments, from 19 to 173 hectares. Using salient features such as rock outcrops, boulders, and banks, Howard mentally broke down the area into manageable plots to survey. In areas with no discernible features, land was divided into strips using pennants and marker poles. As the survey progressed these would be moved along in a kind of rolling grid. When a plant was located, a national grid reference was taken and all the plants within a 2m radius were counted. This could sometimes lead to 100 or more plants being counted in each small area!
Typical rosette with coin for size comparison (L), and rosette with ripening capsule (R).
When Howard first began to survey the species in May 2019, the numbers on the reserve were few, though more extensive elsewhere on Ingleborough. On completion of the survey by October 2021, Howard had counted over 39,600 plants, establishing Ingleborough as a major population centre for the Teesdale Violet. This is an incredible feat when you consider the diminutive size of the plant at only a few mm in size, and the area that was covered in the survey. However, the challenge of finding this plant and the magic and wonder when stumbling on a colony of several hundred in density is something that Howard loves.
Monitoring
There is no specific monitoring scheme for this species, but general botanical records can be sent to the Vice County Recorder for BSBI VC64, David Broughton.
Further information and acknowledgements
NEYEDC would like to thank Howard for his time and expertise in helping to create this blog. If you’d be interested in contributing a piece for the series, contact Lucy at lucy.baldwin@neyedc.co.uk. To find out more about biological recording, see the Naturalists page on our website.