My favourite fact of the week is to have discovered that in the UK there are 2,500 species of eyebright, 2,500 different varieties of that dainty, slender-stemmed flower, with its bright white trumpet. It’s so small and yet always stands out, demanding to be noticed. You can tell it’s a plant that’s determined to survive no matter how much we might try to stamp it out.
At this time of year you can see them, tiny but dazzling dots of white, on grassy roundabouts and roadside verges and in your own lawn, if you’re lucky. Open Country this week (Radio 4, Saturdays and Thursdays, beautifully produced by Helen Chetwynd) took us up to the North Pennines, to the few remaining hay meadows where eyebrights flourish, those fields of green dotted with ‘shards of tiny-coloured pigments’, like a medieval manuscript, white eyebrights competing with daisies and deep purple clover, brilliant yellow buttercups and lilac selfheal. There’s only four square miles of them left on our islands, the seedbed destroyed by intensive farming and artificial fertilisers.
The presenter Helen Mark talked to Neville Turner, a local vet who is passionate about the eyebright, and the stuff ‘waiting in the wings’ to come later into bloom, such as the creamy-white meadowsweet and melancholy thistle. He spent a year photographing a single spot in Teesdale, what he calls his former ‘office’ as he went from farm to farm looking after sick and injured livestock. He’s part of the nationwide initiative to preserve and extend these meadows for their beauty, but also because they are part of our island history, our landscape, painted by Constable, Cotman, Stubbs and Nash, as well as an integral part of the national health. Ninety-eight per cent of them have disappeared in the past 100 years.
We’re all partly to blame, says John Rodwell, professor of ecology. Our demand for cheaper food has led to farming becoming more intensive and less sustainable. The diversity of plants in a hay meadow means less grass and therefore less cropping for the farmer. But without the hay meadows we’re much the poorer, as anyone who has walked through a meadow in full bloom will know. It’s not just the smell, the damp green odour rising from the sward. It’s also the sounds you can hear, of brawling bees, larks rising and those ranks of irritable grasshoppers. Time to stop listening and take your eyes and ears outdoors before the grasses turn brown and the flowers go to seed.
The naturalist and writer Richard Mabey is also talking about Britain’s country plants in a new series on Radio 4 (Sundays). This week on Mabey in the Wild (produced by Susan Marling) he was extolling the wild daffodil (as opposed to its manmade cultivars). He reminded us that when Wordsworth was waxing lyrical about the Narcissus pseudo-narcissus he was writing about the short, shy version, dancing wildly in the wind, that he and Dorothy came across while walking beside Ullswater on 15 April 1802, not the modernised versions beloved of urban parks and suburban roundabouts.
Mabey could make a dandelion sound like a lily, he’s such a persuasive talker, and so deeply knowledgeable. Yet he never talks down to us, his listeners, but rather invites us to share in his enthusiasm. He remembers seeing his first wild daffodils ‘Oh gosh, back in the 1970s’. He’d had ‘a sickly winter’ and was taken by a friend on a surprise trip to the borders of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. Here they saw daffodils crowding over motorway banks, in churchyards and on road islands. They were everywhere; promiscuous. ‘And I was much healed.’
The almost silvery lustre of their leaves is a perfect foil to the yellow flowers, he explains. What makes them so different from the cultivar is their compactness, just six to nine inches tall, the paleness of the yellow outer petals contrasting with the brighter yellow of the trumpet. Because of their size and their sturdy stems, unlike the cultivars, they are ‘wonderfully energised’ when the wind blows, seductively dancing in the breeze, all facing the same way as if in a team display, working together to create that moment of spring splendour.
Mabey visited villagers in Gloucestershire who remembered picking flowers for the Daffodil Line, the service operated by the old GWR, turning flowers into a cash crop. You could earn one penny a bunch of 25 stems, picked free from the wild. The flowers were then put into big tin baths and loaded on to trains that took them to the cathedrals of Canterbury and Winchester in time for the Easter distribution of flowers.
The daffodils disappeared after the war when fields were ploughed up with the mechanisation of farming. The railway line was axed in 1959. Now most of us will only see the big, blowsy cultivars. ‘I fear,’ says Mabey, ‘there’s not much we can do about this…’
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