Cicerbita alpina
Alpine Blue-sow-thistle

Cicerbita alpina
©Bob Gibbons/Natural Image

A handsome plant with tall rough stems and heads of large blue dandelion-like flowers. It grows on moist mountain rock ledges, usually inaccessible, and is an Arctic-Alpine plant, a relic of the last Ice Age.

The plant has always been rare, and can now only be found at four sites in the Grampian Mountains of eastern Scotland.

It has very specific ecological requirements, and former sites are thought to have been lost by overgrazing - the present sites are inaccessible to deer and sheep.

Other threats are cutting by humans and habitat change due to rock falls.

Classified as Vulnerable and protected under Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.