14 Sunday Feb 2021
As I’m sure most of you know, in Victorian Britain flowers had special meanings, and many people could understand the language of flowers, could even send coded messages by choosing carefully the flowers they included in a floral gift to a friend or potential lover.
Crocuses, apparently, symbolised youth and cheerfulness. Sadly, my youth is long gone but seeing these beauties on a recent walk certainly made me feel cheery.
10 Sunday May 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
Bittersweet nightshade, British wildflowers, Common milkwort, Cut-Leaved crane’s-bill, Flax, Goat's-beard, Spring colour, Wood avens
Here are this week’s newly flowering wildflowers …
Bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara), also known as Woody nightshade and Deadly nightshade, though my Flora Britannica assures me this is actually one of the less poisonous members of the nightshade family.
Cut-leaved crane’s-bill (Geranium dissectum), one of the many lovely members of the extended Geranium family.
Flax (Linum usitatissimum), a small delicate plant, with beautiful pale blue flowers. This is rather different from the plant I, as a New Zealander, usually associate with this name – see my September 2018 post Flax.
Goat’s-beard (Tragopogon pratensis). As well as producing these glorious large sunny flowers, this wildflower, also known as Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon, has the most wonderful seedheads.
Wood avens (Geum urbanum) – you may know this wildflower by its alternate name of Herb Bennet.
Common milkwort (Polygala vulgaris). Discovered during my walk to Lavernock Nature Reserve earlier this week, this was the first time I’d seen this pretty little plant, though it’s very small and was almost hidden amongst the other wildflowers and grasses so it may be that I had simply overlooked it on previous visits.
One theory behind its common name is that the flowers of milkwort are shaped like udders and so medieval herbalists, following the ‘signature’ belief (that body parts can be treated by plants that resemble them), used to prescribe this plant to nursing mothers to increase their milk flow.
03 Sunday May 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
Bee-fly, British wildflowers, Grangemoor Park, Lychnis flos-cuculi, Ragged robin, Silene flos-cuculi, Spring colour, spring flowers
At Grangemoor Park on Friday, I spotted my first flowering Ragged robin for the year.
This gorgeous wildflower was formerly known as Lychnis flos-cuculi, but is now Silene flos-cuculi – from a scientific article I browsed, this seems a complicated story of almost constant reclassification of the species! You will still see both names used in books and on line, which is why I’ve mentioned both here.
According to a couple of books I discovered on the ‘language of flowers’, Ragged robin’s symbolic meaning is ‘wit’, and it is dedicated to Saint Barnabas. The ever-informative First Nature website says:
Lychnis, the genus name, comes from the Greek noun lychnos, meaning lamp; it refers to the use of a plant in this genus as the wick of an oil lamp. The specific epithet flos-cuculi means ‘flower of the cuckoo’ and was probably chosen because the first flowers of Ragged Robin appear just as the first cuckoos are being heard (in Britain and Ireland at least) in May.
A special moment: to try to stop it swaying in the breeze so I could get a sharp photo, I was holding one of the blooms when a bee-fly decided to zoom in for a feed of nectar. That super long proboscis comes in handy for long narrow flowers like these.
26 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
British wildflowers, Bush vetch, Common bird's foot trefoil, Common vetch, Grass vetchling, Red campion, Spring colour, spring wildflowers
You know the summer’s not far away when members of the extensive Pea family start to flower and, during this week’s exercise walks, I’ve spotted four Pea species newly come in to flower. The first were three of the vetches …
Bush vetch (Vicia sepium)
Common vetch (Vicia sativa) … and friends.
Grass vetchling (Lathyrus nissolia)
And, also, one of my all-time favourites – possibly because it’s also a favourite with a lot of the butterflies and day-flying moths I adore so much, Common bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus).
Oh, and this week’s new blooms also included one not-a-pea wildflower, the always lovely Red campion (Silene dioica).
29 Sunday Mar 2020
Posted in nature, spring, wildflowers
Tags
Barren strawberry, British wildflowers, Common Stork's-bill, Dog violet, Honesty, marsh marigold, Ramsons, Spring colour, spring flowers, Wild garlic
During this week’s walks, which have, of course, in our current lockdown situation, been shorter and much more restricted than my usual meanderings, my mood has been brightened by the sight of our beautiful flowering wild plants, especially those that have just come into bloom in recent days. They’re a heartening reminder of better times to come … eventually. These are those I’ve found this week.
Barren strawberry (Potentilla sterilis): It seems a shame that this species of strawberry doesn’t produce the luscious fruit we all enjoy in the summer months. Instead, its berries are small and quite hard.
Common stork’s-bill (Erodium cicutarium): I was delighted to spot these pretty little things. I’m a big fan of the whole Geranium family, the crane’s-bills and the stork’s-bills.
Dog-violet (Viola sp.): The photos I took weren’t good enough for me to work out whether these are Early dog-violets or Common dog-violets but they’re pretty nonetheless.
Honesty (Lunaria annua): When I had a garden I used to grow Honesty, partly for its lovely flowers but also to harvest the branches of seed pods once they’d dried. I love their fragility and the way they glisten in the sunshine. Their vernacular name, Moonpennies, is so appropriate.
Marsh-marigold (Caltha palustris): These were growing in the depths of a small dingle right in the middle of the town where I live, the flowers are little bright lights beaming up from the gloom.
Ramsons (Allium ursinum): That same valley where I found the Marsh-marigolds is also home to swathes of Ramsons, also known to many of us as Wild garlic. There must be thousands of these plants in the valley and along the sides of the stream bed that leads from there down towards the sea.
17 Monday Feb 2020
A new Spring flower has appeared in my local area, this time six bursts of the bright sunshine yellow that is Coltsfoot, the flower that appears before its leaves. I had just been sheltering, rather ineffectively, from a short sharp shower of rain when I spotted the flowers beside the path ahead of me. What a delight!
09 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in nature, wildflowers, winter
Not only did yesterday’s walk bring me the amazing sighting of a Mandarin duck, it also delighted me with this drop of golden sunlight come to earth, my first Lesser celandine flower of 2020.
01 Thursday Mar 2018
Tags
daffodil, First day of spring, spring, Spring colour, spring flowers, St David's Day, Welsh national day
Dydd Gwŷl Dewi hapus! And Happy Spring!
18 Tuesday Apr 2017
Posted in flowers, nature, wildflowers
Tags
Cardamine pratensis, Cuckooflower, Lady's smock, Milkmaid, Spring colour, spring flowers, wildflowers
It seems that everywhere I walk at the moment there’s Cuckooflower. With its penchant for damp soggy ground, it can be found sprinkled amongst the reeds at the edge of Cardiff Bay wetlands, underlining the willow scrub along the edges of the River Taff, accentuating the lines of a drying drain at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park. And it’s such a pretty little thing, with its pale lilac flowers sitting high on an upright stalk, all the better for the bees and butterflies to find them.
Its scientific name is Cardamine pratensis and, if you don’t know it as Cuckooflower (it flowers at the time the cuckoos return to Britain), then you may know it by its other popular names, Milkmaid and Lady’s smock. Milkmaid is the older name, possibly a reference to its feminine colour and blousy shape when the flowers are first opening and I read, in an article in the Darlington & Stockton Times 23 June 2006, that
‘When Christianity came to these islands, that feminine association was transferred to the Virgin Mary, which led to a host of other names for the flower, such as my lady’s smock, lady’s glove and dozens more.
There is one old story which says that St Helena found Our Lady’s smock in a cave near Bethlehem, an article of clothing she left behind. It was later taken to St Sophia and then to Aix la Chapelle, where it was venerated for centuries, with this little wild flower being named in several European countries in honour of that relic.
‘In Europe, a lot of superstition used to surround this flower. It was thought that if anyone picked it, a thunderstorm would break out. It was also thought to generate lightning and for this reason was never taken into a house. In parts of England, it was believed to attract adders, Britain’s only poisonous snake, with a notion that anyone picking the flower would be bitten before the year was out.’
Luckily, I prefer to leave wildflowers where they are for everyone to enjoy so haven’t picked any, though I’m now almost tempted, just to see what happens … almost.
14 Friday Apr 2017
Blue is not a colour we see often in flowers – I can only think of a few blue-flowering plants: delphiniums, agapanthus, hydrangeas, cornflowers, bluebells of course, and today’s plant, the Grape hyacinth (Muscari sp.). The scarcity of blue flowers is due to plants having no true blue pigment so they must perform a degree of chemical manipulation to make the colour. According to author David Lee, who wrote Nature’s Palette: The science of plant color (University of Chicago Press, 2010), ‘Plants tweak, or modify, [their] red anthocyanin pigments to make blue flowers. They do this through a variety of modifications involving pH shifts and mixing of pigments, molecules and ions.’
That knowledge makes me appreciate even more the delicate Grape hyacinths that are currently adorning many of my neighbours’ gardens and blooming prolifically at the local cemetery. They are probably Muscari armenaicum – muscari comes from the Greek muschos, referring to their musky scent, and armenaicum is a clue to their area of origin, Armenia and the meadows and woodlands of the eastern Mediterranean right through to the Caucasus. The Grape hyacinth was first cultivated in European gardens in the 1870s but spreads freely and rapidly so has become naturalised in Britain, much of Europe and North America.
