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Grange-over-Sands is a Victorian seaside resort on the sheltered eastern shore of Morecambe Bay, its promenade and ornamental gardens tucked beneath the limestone hills of the Cartmel peninsula. The microclimate here is among the mildest in Cumbria, and the mature Victorian villas and their walled gardens carry an unusual range of flowering shrubs, wisteria, buddleia and old orchard trees. The limestone pavement and scrub woodland of Hampsfell above the town, the hawthorn-lined lanes of Cartmel Fell, and the rich estuarine margins of the Kent estuary give honey bees a long and varied season — ivy on the limestone garden walls and hedges closes the year well into October.

Spring comes late here; blackthorn and hawthorn only really get going in mid-May. Sycamore is important around every fell farm; bramble and white clover carry midsummer. The defining flow is fell heather — bell from late July, ling into September — across the central Lakes, the Howgills and the north Pennines, still widely migrated to for one of the best heather crops in England. Bilberry in the oakwoods adds a small early-summer supplement. Limestone pavement herbs on the Morecambe Bay edge and ivy on whitewashed cottages finish the year.