Thomas Ashworth
Why spring rewards the slow walker
Spring is the season that forgives dawdling. The hedgebanks fill up in stages — blackthorn first, then a faint green haze, then a rush of yellow, white and pink that seems to happen in a single week. A mile that takes twenty minutes in January can comfortably take an hour in May, and you will still feel you have been somewhere.
You do not need a botanist's memory to enjoy it. Three flowers — cowslip, red campion and greater stitchwort — will carry you through most of a British spring. Once you can name them reliably, you start noticing what the ground beneath them is telling you: how long the grass has been left, whether the soil has ever been sprayed, how much shade falls on the bank.
Cowslip: the nodding yellow cluster
Cowslip is the one to learn first, because once your eye has it you can spot it from a passing car. Look for a cluster of five to fifteen deep yellow flowers on a single stem, each one a narrow tube that hangs downwards and to one side, as though the whole bunch has flopped over together. Old names for it include keys of heaven and St Peter's keys, and the nodding shape explains why.
Three things to check
- The flowers hang in a one-sided cluster, not singly.
- Each flower has five petals with a small patch of orange at the centre — a nectar guide, easy to see with a hand lens.
- At ground level there is a rosette of crinkled, deep-veined, slightly hairy leaves. Leaves like that with no flowers mean you should come back in a fortnight.
Where to look: old, unimproved grassland — churchyards, village verges, the edges of commons, sunny banks on limestone or neutral soil. Cowslips dislike heavy feeding and ploughing, so a good stand usually means the ground has been left alone for decades. They flower from April into May, and the heads turn pale and papery as seed sets.
Do not muddle cowslip with primrose, which flowers earlier, usually in ones and twos on separate stalks, paler and flatter, opening wide in the sun. Cowslip is clustered, nodding and a richer yellow.
Red campion: pink stars with notched petals
Red campion is the flower that makes a hedgerow look painted. The colour is a soft rose-red rather than a true red, and it grows in loose, generous drifts.
- Five petals, each notched deeply at the tip, so the flower appears to have ten narrow petals.
- Stems and leaves are hairy, and the upper stem can feel faintly sticky.
- Male and female flowers grow on separate plants. Peer into the centre and you will see either small yellow stamens or a cluster of curled white styles.
Where to look: hedgerows, woodland edges, shaded banks and roadside verges, often alongside bluebells and stitchwort. It flowers from April to June and sometimes puts on a second showing in autumn. White campion is its paler, later cousin in more open, sunnier spots; where the two meet they hybridise into a washed-out pink.
Greater stitchwort: the white star of the hedge bank
If cowslip is the flower you learn first, stitchwort is the one you notice by accident. It appears as a scatter of white stars low in the grass or scrambling over a low bush, and it never looks quite sturdy enough to be there.
- Five white petals, each split almost to the base, so the flower reads as ten slender points.
- Thin, weak, sprawling stems that lean on grass and hedges for support.
- Narrow, grey-green, pointed leaves growing in pairs along the stem, with slightly rough edges.
Folk names include wedding cakes and star of Bethlehem, both of which suit it. Flowering runs from April to June in dappled shade: woodland rides, hedge bottoms, the sheltered side of a bank. Two easy confusions are common chickweed, which is smaller with oval leaves and less starry flowers, and wood anemone, which has larger single flowers with purple-flushed undersides and leaves arranged in a whorl.
Where to look without disturbing what you find
Wildflowers are at their most fragile in spring, and a few quiet habits make a real difference.
- Stay on the path, or on the mown strip at the edge of a verge. Kneeling in the middle of a cowslip patch crushes leaves that took the plant a whole year to build.
- Do not pick anything. A picked flower cannot set seed, and the patch looks poorer for everyone who follows. If you want a record, photograph it.
- Use a hand lens or your camera's zoom for the details — the orange eye of a cowslip, the notched petals of campion. You will learn far more from a close look than from a specimen.
- Keep dogs close and under control on flower-rich grassland and near livestock, and take everything home with you.
- Leave gates as you find them, use stiles rather than climbing banks, and avoid walking the same line through long grass after rain.
Making it a slow spring habit
The best way to learn plants is to walk the same short route once a week. Pick somewhere within a mile or two of home — a lane, a churchyard, a stretch of riverside path — and go at the same unhurried pace each time. Note the dates when each flower first opens, and jot down a line or two about the weather, the light or the birdsong that went with it.
Ten minutes sitting still on a warm bank will teach you more than an hour of walking past. Cowslips, campion and stitchwort are the beginning of a long friendship with the countryside, and they are waiting in the least dramatic places: the verge outside the village, the shaded edge of a field, the bank you have driven past a hundred times without once looking down.
