Gardening blogGardens This article is more than 10 years oldA chequered history
This article is more than 10 years oldThe snakeshead fritillary is the star of the hay meadow in spring, writes Andy Byfield of PlantlifeThere is something so elegant about the snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris). Its understated and architectural beauty is so graceful, and its design is so finely tuned for the environment in which it grows.
When in young growth, the flower buds are tightly encircled by the sheathing leaves, and together these poke vertically up through the grass like the nose of a small snake. As their stems elongate, so they arc over to ensure that the fertile bits within their dusky, nodding bells are protected from the rain. Once successful pollination has occurred, the stems straighten again so that the seed pods are held aloft on tall, wiry stems, ready to scatter their seeds to the four corners.
They are hay meadow plants par excellence. Tall, and without any basal rosette of leaves, they soon perish if grazed or cut in full growth: without leaves, no energy is returned to the bulb as they wither, so the plant becomes progressively weakened. Instead, they flourish in those fabulous and all-too-rare hay meadows of yore, flowering amongst the dandelions and lady's smock as the cuckoos arrive, maturing as billows of cow parsley flower under lofty belts of hedgerow elms, and scattering their seeds – finishing their season's business – as the blades of the hay cutting machinery cut and dry the year's hay crop at the height of summer.
They are beautiful too. When a glaring sun sits high in the sky, they take on a sombre hue: "the springing grass ... dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries" wrote the great Sissinghurst gardener and writer Vita Sackwille-West, in her poem The Land. Yet when backlit in the softer glow of early morning or mid evening, they glow a warm rich red, the colour of a young Beaujolais. They are coming into flower as I write, and I can think of few nicer ways to spend a couple of hours than wandering through the countless thousands that grace meadows at Magdalen College, Ducklington or Cricklade in the upper Thames valley.
There's debate as to whether snakesheads are native in their heartland of central-southern England. The plant was first recorded from British gardens in 1578, but the earliest records from wild habitats date from as late as 1736, by which time more than 86% of all our native flowers had been discovered and documented. It seems inconceivable that the august professors and students of botany at Oxford simply failed to notice such a glorious flower adorning their local Thameside meadows, where it grows in local profusion to this day.
Native or not, the species has an enormous cultural resonance with the human inhabitants of Oxford and beyond. In one of his most lyrical accounts, the writer and botanist Richard Mabey (in his epic Flora Britannica) recounts the relationship between locals and this most loved of wild flowers. The species garnered a whole range of local names – frawcups, leper's bells, oaksey lily, minety bell to mention a few – and in halcyon days past, the plant was so abundant locally that for a few pennies you could mosey through certain colonies picking large bunches of their arching stems. But the snakeshead has suffered a dramatic rise and fall, for today the vast majority of their old haunts have been drained and ploughed, and they – along with the elms and cuckoos – have largely been reduced to fading memory today. Now we could go round planting up new meadows with bulbs, but in the absence of history and association, I wonder whether such new colonies would elicit the same powerful passions among locals that our age-old colonies did?
However, do try snakesheads in your own garden, for they are easy to grow - either in a border or naturalised in grass – provided that you garden away from the parched and free-draining chalks and sands. Success, more often than not, comes down to choosing good healthy bulbs to start with. These should be plump and ivory-white, with the texture of an uncooked cashew, and be roughly the diameter of a 50p piece. Avoid wizened and dry, rust-coloured bulbs like the plague. Plant them up to four inches deep as soon as they appear in the autumn bulb catalogues or garden centres, into a well-dug loamy soil, lightened with a forkfull or two of leaf mould. And if you do want to recreate those flower-rich grasslands of our grandparents memories, they do well planted in any lawn on a reasonably fertile soil, provided that the soil is not too fertile. But remember, these are classic hay meadow flowers: you can cut the grass as many times as you like when the plant is below ground, but when growing, flowering setting seed or withering, do please remember to leave the grass long – and enjoy the show.
Andy Byfield is one of the founders of the wild plant charity Plantlife.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKSZm7KiusOsq7KklWS0or7DnqWippdir627xmhpaWljZK6xvo5rbWirnpa4pr%2FHnpidZZantrW1y6WYq7E%3D