CAMPIONS

Some other successes

Campions are one common species of native wild flower, which hasn't been able to breach the Moors to be able to grow up here, although it's much rarer cousin the Ragged Robbin grows here abundantly in a few choice ungrazed boggy areas.

A few colonies of Campion did exist up here prior to my arrival, but only in and around gardens, where people had obviously planted them. But it was clear from the colonies they had formed that they were quite able to cope with the harsher conditions up here.

As with many new species, I tried them in the garden first and after a few years, they too started to form colonies, so I began to plant them around hedges and wood/field edges around Dartmoor.

Over the years I have planted many of them and success had seemed limited, however this incorrect observation has led me to discover many vulnerabilities about this plant, for instance it can take a number of years to flower from seed & the seeds seldom make it very far from the mother plant & whilst they're not as bad as the wild daffodils at dispersing their seeds; the clumps do seem to spread very slowly and I would presume that this plant would find it difficult to spread to new areas it's self, in less directly connected to some form of suitable habitat. Which is of course, why they are not up here, on the top of Dartmoor, because they can not grow on the grazed moor, which completely surrounds these places.