They can be seen all year round, but May is when flowers of Red Campion really brighten up the local hedgerows, but we also have five close relatives living here in Sidmouth, we have: White Campion, Sea Campion, Bladder Campion, Ragged Robin and Nottingham Catchfly.
As a group, all of these plants are sometimes called Catchflies because they have sticky hairs at the top of the stem and you often see tiny insects trapped there. The plants are not being carnivorous, it is believed the sticky hairs just prevent crawling insects from climbing up to the flower to steal nectar but with no chance of moving to another plant to transfer pollen.
Red Campion is by far the commonest species of the group. There can hardly be a local hedgerow or woodland edge that does not have many of the striking red-pink flowers. Red Campion is dependent on flying insects for pollination because there are separate male and female plants. You can spot the female flowers which have five curled stigmas that protrude from the flower tube.
White Campion is much less common but there is a colony in the roadside verges on Salcombe Hill. W.H. Cullen also recorded it ‘on the new road beyond Harpford Wood’ in his 1849 plant list Flora Sidostiensis. There are also pale pink ones on Salcombe Hill, Red and White Campion are very closely related and will cross breed.
If you go down to the beach by the Millennium Walkway, you will find Sea Campion spreading across the shingle. This tough little plant can stand the harsh conditions but still produce delightfully delicate white flowers. Sea Campion has single flowers on each stem, but the plants keep to a compact mat as a form of protection and this means there are masses of the flowers.
Up on Alma Field there is another white flower, but this one has the bud scales of each flower puffed up like a paper lampshade from the 1970s, these are called Bladder Campion, an unappealing name for a beautiful flower. The five petals are split down the middle and the female stigmas combine to make a frilly tuft.
The petals of Ragged Robin are red and ragged, quite simple really. Ragged Robin is a wetland plant and Cullen records them growing in Bickwell which was very boggy farmland before it was developed. There are still many springs that rise in the gardens.
The fifth member of the group and looking the most delicate is Nottingham Catchfly, but it lives happily exposed on rock outcrops of the cliff at Dunscombe. The link to Nottingham is that the plants used to grow on the walls of Nottingham Castle and they were chosen as the county flower. Sadly, they disappeared from the castle over 100 years ago, probably because of atmospheric pollution. Now that the city’s air is much cleaner, there are efforts to restore Nottingham Catchfly to the castle walls.
Ed Dolphin
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