In the spotlight

Lady’s smock (Cardamine pratensis)

Cuckoo flower, lady’s smock, meadow bittercress and spinks are some of the folk names for Cardamine pratensis. Now is its finest hour, when the foot-high slender stems bear, at their tips, clustered, four-petalled flowers of the most delicate silvery pink, brushed at the base with a hint of pale lemon. Ornamenting roadside banks and verges (if they’ve escaped council strimming) and sprinkled in patches throughout pastures where the soil is heavy and damp, the cuckoo flower is frequently seen in the company of primroses. Yet it’s no longer really abundant. Victorian naturalist

Richard Jefferies noted, in the vicinity of Kingston and Claygate: ‘White cuckooflowers… so thick in many fields that the green tint of the grass is lost under their silvery hue’—a vision long gone.

The ‘cuckoo flower’ epithet suggests its appearance coinciding with that of actual cuckoos (page 84), although, often, the flower slightly precedes the migrating bird. A valuable food plant for the orange-tip butterfly in both larval and adult stages, Cardamine pratensis has edible leaves with a peppery flavour akin to watercress.