Country diary: Half a century of watching this river change | Phil Gates

Witton-le-Wear, County Durham: It's a lucky dip of exotic and native plants, the old and the new. It will, of course, change againIt is almost exactly 49 years since we first botanised these gravel banks beside the River Wear, during the long summer drought of 1976. New to the area, we'd heard that the mounds of river?smoothed pebbles, where the water table was always within reach of roots, were well known among local botanists as lucky-dip hunting grounds, even in the driest summers. A place colonised by a pioneering flora of native ruderal species, alongside a cosmopolitan community of exotic garden throw-outs washed up by receding floods in spring.My diary for that day records monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus), a native to riverbanks in America's Pacific north-west, but often cultivated upstream in Weardale's cottage gardens. Memory can be treacherous, but my recollection is of drifts of its yellow flowers. Today, after half an hour's searching, we found just one - monkey flower is an alien with a tenuous foothold here and has never become invasive, unlike some international arrivals. In the riverbank woodland, pink and white thickets of Himalayan balsam mingle with tall, yellow?flowered drifts of Canadian golden rod and central European dotted loosestrife that all established a strong bridgehead then moved inland. Continue reading...