Stop children picking wild flowers? I only wish they would start

Where do you stand on picking wild flowers? Oh no! Not there! Oh well, that’s the UK’S endangered lady orchid population gone for a burton.

The trouble with allowing townies into the countryside is that their urban urchins will insist on running riot and picking the wild flowers. That’s always been the received wisdom at any rate.

But now conservation charity Plantlife says that it’s fine for children to pick abundant blooms of 12 varieties, such as buttercups and oxeye daisies, so they will become curious about the wealth of other plants that inhabit our fields and hedgerows. The chap from the National Beekeeping Centre for Wales was a lot more hardline; and understandably so, given that 97per cent of our meadowland has been lost in his lifetime.

Picking primroses is a gateway to digging them up and taking them home to our gardens, he insisted. Dandelions were so important to honeybees that we must only look and never touch.

It’s a tough dilemma, but on balance I’m with Plantlife on this one; my love of nature was sparked by

exploring it hands-on as a child and the more I learned, the greater my respect.

I can still tell my wild cranesbill from my herb robert and our ancient copy of The Observer’s Book of Wildflowers

remains required loo reading. John Humphrys incidentally wondered aloud on air why dandelions were associated with wetting the bed. The French word for them is pissenlit on account of their diuretic effects; extracts and tea can be bought in health food shops.

But back to our woodlands and clifftops; much as I understand why custodians of the land want to protect wild flowers from the attentions of marauding children, I fear they are more than a little out of touch.

These days, vanishingly few kids have any interest in seeing wild flowers, much less picking them – and to my mind that is a far greater tragedy than joyfully plucking the odd handful of cow parsley or a fistful of dog violets.