A snake’s-head fritillary in the grass
Once equivocal about wildflowers, Nicholas Coleridge’s mind was opened to their natural beauty by Fritillaria meleagris, which carpets the grounds at Magdalen College in Oxford, as he explains in this extract from Wildflowers for The Queen
Nicholas Coleridge reveals why he has fallen for natural beauty in an extract from the new book Wildflowers for The Queen
The very wilfulness and unpredictability of wildflowers invest them with character
UNTIL my epiphany, I was for years ambivalent about wildflowers. They struck me in every way as inferior to ‘proper’ cultivated flowers in a proper garden, organised in height order in a herbaceous border. Wildflowers were capricious: their randomness, their unpredictability of habitat, the fact that wildflowers grow in their own sweet way without any intervention by human hand, made them seem second rate. Hardly better than weeds. You found a patch of this or a patch of that in a wood or a meadow, but there was no artful display. Wildflowers were too much like happenchance.
It was wild foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) and then the common fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris), often known as the snake’s-head fritillary, which opened my mind. The beauty of wildflowers in their natural setting eclipses their domesticated cousins in a flowerbed. Overnight, I became a convert, recognising an authenticity and fragile gloriousness I had never seen before. In an instant, flowers in a garden felt like captives, or hostages paraded in ranks by prison guards, their gardeners.
A wildflower is free range, a garden flower like a battery chicken. The very wilfulness and unpredictability of wildflowers invest them with character, flourishing where their windblown seed takes root, clustering in patterns dictated by nature rather than the diktats of a garden designer.
The aesthetic (and moral) superiority of the wildflower over the garden flower is a conviction with its roots in the mid 17th century, which, by the early 18th century, was widely adopted by persons of taste. In the National Art Library at the V&A Museum is a threevolume set of illustrated books of extraordinary beauty, and I urge you to order them up from the archives, and inspect them for yourself.
Flora Londinensis: plates and descriptions of such plants as grow wild in the environs of London, with a description of each plant in Latin and English, to which are added their several uses in medicine, agriculture, the rural economy and other arts, was edited by William Curtis (and dedicated to his patron John Stuart, Earl of Bute). It was published in 1777. The book contains several hundred of the most delicate and fastidious paintings of wildflowers—lesser butterfly orchids (then Orchis bifolia, now Platanthera bifolia), bitter willow (Salix monandra), marsh valerian (Valeriana dioica), all three of which I swear I have spotted growing wild in the desolate waterlands of Stratford East. There are dozens and dozens of different grasses in the book, all exquisite. They made me want to scatter
their seeds over our Worcestershire meadows, all of them; I couldn’t choose which I liked best. And then comes the tiny, purple bastard pimpernel (Centunculus minimus) and comfrey (Symphytum officinale), once apparently ‘a very common plant by London riversides and on the edge of wet ditches’, before riversides and ditches were swept away by the building of the Chelsea and Westminster embankment.
So many wildflowers which once clearly flourished in London are all but gone: primroses (Primula vulgaris), fritillaries, the longheaded poppy (Papaver dubium). ‘In Battersea Fields,’ says Curtis, ‘where the soil is light, the dubium is common.’ But, in Worcestershire, the sharp-eyed can still find arrays of them, as well as violets (Viola sp.), cowslips (Primula veris), oxslip (Primula elatior), dandelions (Taraxacum officinale)
and meadow crowfoot (Ranunculus acris),
often known as meadow buttercup. And banks of foxgloves lurking in the deepest recess of the wood, in lightdappled clearings. In his 1875 book British Wild Flowers in Relation to Insects, Sir John Lubbock, the Member of Parliament for Maidstone, is vehement on the primary importance of wild species, ‘The forms and colours have been modified [over time]… by the unconscious selection exercised by insects, [as opposed to breeding by horticulturalists]’. He echoes William Robinson in his 1844 volume The Wild Garden, who applauds the sight of wildflowers ‘in their favoured (natural) habitat’ over anything else.
Both men were 100% right; I’m only sorry it took me so long to recognise it. Nicholas Coleridge is chairman of the V&A Museum and a contributor to ‘Wildflowers for The Queen: A Visual Celebration of Britain’s Coronation Meadows’ by Hugo Rittson Thomas. Produced in partnership with Plantlife (which will receive profits from sales), with a foreword by its patron, The Prince of Wales, the book is out on February 4 (Wildflower Press, £50)