THE profusion of wildflowers which Bainbridge artist Janet Rawlins captures so exquisitely in the intriguingly titled A Grass Rope to Catch a Unicorn speaks of a landscape teeming with life and colour and texture.

Flowers, grasses, roots, buds, berries and seed pods, their names etched in her fine, copperplate handwriting – sweet cicely, biting stonecrop, monkey flower, crosswort, wild turnip, with its tiny, delicate, petals belying its lumpish name – seem to burst from the page.

There are more than 300 illustrations, painted with the precision of a botanist – which, Janet insists, emphatically, she is not – and the skill of an artist who knows and loves her subject, the wildflowers of Wensleydale.

There is little in the way of a narrative, and so nothing to suggest anything but beauty and abundance in this lovely part of the world where she has lived, drawn and painted for more than 40 years.

But in the foreword, BBC presenter John Craven, a longstanding friend of both Janet and the Dales, sounds a note of warning that lies, unintentionally but prophetically, beneath the surface.

The paintings are, he says, “a visual delight but also a warning that many species of flora are increasingly under threat in our upland meadows – indeed, some in this book have probably now disappeared from the places where Janet found them”.

Statistics from the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, whose Hay Time Appeal will benefit from the sales of the book, lend considerable weight to Craven’s concern: in the last half century some 97 per cent of meadows in the UK have been lost, largely due to modern, intensive farming methods.

The Wildlife Trusts’ State of Nature Report 2013 shows that 60 per cent of the species studied in the UK have declined over recent decades. More than one in ten of all the species assessed are under threat of disappearing altogether.

Paying tribute to Janet, the YDMT’s Sarah Brewer points out that the Yorkshire Dales contains around a sixth of the UK’s remaining upland hay meadows.

“These precious habitats support up to 120 species of wild flowers and grasses.

Thanks to the support of farmers, landowners and people like Janet who share our passion for wildflowers, we are continuing our work to safeguard the future of traditional hay meadows in the Dales for future generations,” she says.

Janet insists that most of the flower paintings were done as “relaxation” during a major commission she undertook in the 1970s and early 1980s to produce 38 large-scale embroidered panels for branches of the Leeds Permanent Building Society, from Deal in Kent to Dundee. In 1991 she restored the Ripon panels for a solo exhibition at Fountains Hall. A selection of the panels is included as an addendum to the book, as are some of the fabric collages and watercolours she has worked in her long career.

Janet recalls how, during one of her flower-painting excursions along the River Bain, she watched a baby rabbit nibble a buttercup, stalk first, then flower.

“Up the River Bain, I marked with a stick an orchid, not quite open, but returned the next morning to find an empty stalk.”

And the title of the book?

She explains: “A cast iron unicorn in a Skipton ironmonger’s solved the problem of a name for my new house in Bainbridge. I knew that legend says one must have a maiden with a grass rope to catch a unicorn, but this time it would have to make do with an illustration.

“At the ceremony of ‘cutting the first sod’ I cut the grass with a pair of scissors and made a grass rope. When writing to a friend in Australia I decorated the border of the airmail paper with the first few flowers appearing in the garth beside the River Bain.”

  • A Grass Rope to Catch a Unicorn: Wensleydale Wild Flowers, will be published in the spring by York Publishing Services Ltd.