Country diary: Slipping down a cliff face, searching for a fading bloom | Mary Montague

My gaze flits between the dot on my phone and my footing as I slither down the hummocky decline. I’m on a return visit to the tall sea lavender before its blooms fade. This little herbaceous perennial was one of the highlights of a recent survey of the Lecale coastline by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), which I accompanied. Its colony sprinkles the crevices of a small cliff of broken shale overlooking the Irish Sea. And I’m almost there.

Sea lavender is found in our gardens and its varieties are known as “ statices ” (it is unrelated to the more common lavenders we’re more familiar with). Most sea lavenders reproduce sexually using pollination, but the wild species native to Britain and Ireland are sexually sterile. They get around this by producing seeds from unfertilised egg cells, a type of self-cloning that retains the mobility of seed dispersal. This is thought to have helped isolated populations of sea lavender – such as this one – migrate independently across pockets of suitable habitat. The result is precisely what we have: unique lineages scattered across different colonies .

This colony of tall sea lavender is the only one in Northern Ireland. It was discovered in 1902 by the renowned botanist Robert Lloyd Praeger , who returned to it in 1906. After that, however, nobody else could find it. In 1938 an aged Praeger lamented that it must have been lost in a fall of rock or clay. He was wrong. Another sighting was reported in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1985 that Paul Hackney of the BSBI reliably grid-referenced its location. In 2000 Hackney, with the botanist Graham Day , fixed that location using GPS.

Day led the 2024 BSBI survey, which means that, even today, I’m still only a few degrees of separation from Praeger himself. He was here. And the rocks are still speckled with mauve flowers. I crouch down at the very clump that I used to drop the pin on my phone. What a thrill to have another chance to see this. From a basal rosette of spear‑shaped leaves, long, slender stems branch out to trembling spikes of inflorescence. The mauve petals are beginning to fall, but they leave behind the white sepals known as “everlasting flowers”.

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