OUR weekend walk took us into Coverdale where, near the ancient stepping stones that plodge across the river, the tree-lined slopes were covered by a carpet of bluebells.

A light breeze blew through them, nodding the little plants’ delicate heads, tinkling them gently, and they moved almost like a shoal of purpley-blue fish.

But these were very different to the bluebells which grow ramrod straight outside my house, smothering everything beneath their profusion of oniony leaves. They are a different hue of blue, stouter, the flowerstalks more upright, less drooping – they are more a raucous foghorn than a tuneful peal. They are Spanish bluebells, and this is the bulb world’s equivalent of the battle between grey and red squirrels.

Spanish bluebells were brought over in 1683 to add a splash of springtime colour to the gardens of fashionable stately homes. They were remarkably well-behaved because it wasn’t until 1909 that they were spotted in the wild. Again, they were well-behaved, as it wasn’t until the 1980s that people began noticing how they were hybridising with the native plants – and their stronger genes were coming out on top.

Now it is said that within 50 years there will be no wholly British bulbs left. Our gentle characteristics will have been overwhelmed by the thuggish tendencies of the invader.

But just as the red squirrel survives in remote parts of Northumberland, I hope the British bluebell can cling on in ancient corners of Coverdale.

I USED this space for a similar story last year that I found fascinating: the invasion of the Danish Scurvy Grass, which is the fastest spreading plant in the country. Until the 1980s, it was happy growing in salty conditions by the seaside, but then it realised that salt was spread on our wintry roads, and so it rapidly colonised the verges, thriving in the bare soil of the saltburned strip.

I’ve been looking out for its tiny dirty white flower ever since. I spotted it right the way up Weardale on the A689 to Wolsingham recently, but it doesn’t look as if it has penetrated the A6108 Swaledale any further than Richmond. However, a single, straggly specimen, with two pitiful blooms, has found a precarious foothold in the gutter outside my front door.

LAST week’s column about my refusal to vote in the police and crime commissioners election – none of the candidates in my nick of the woods had elicited my support and I didn’t think it right to politicise the police by voting along purely party lines – generated some interesting feedback. Thank-you.

Some in Durham defended casting their ballots for the existing PCC as they, understandably, wanted to preserve the only force in the country to be ranked as “outstanding”, but several other callers were angry about the cost of the exercise.

One told me how she had voted in her parish council elections and had deliberately spoilt her PCC ballot by writing “spend this money on the police” across it.

“I don’t know if anyone reads them as they count them, but it made me feel better,” she said.

Then I was told of a polling station somewhere north of the Tees. A station – often a hired hall – is staffed from 7am to 10pm by a presiding officer and a lower paid poll clerk. The station in question cost about £600 for the day, served about 300 potential voters of whom fewer than 30 turned up.

So the cost per ballot was at least £20.

But, of course, you can’t put a price on democracy.