When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady’s smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
“Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear.
Unpleasant to a married ear!
Love’s Labours Lost, William Shakespeare (1598)
Along the Stroudwater Navigation an early spring delight is the pale-pink cuckoo flower. So called because it was thought to herald the return of the cuckoo.
The shape of the four-petalled flowers accounts for other folk names: lady’s smock and milkmaids. Also known as meadow bittercress (hence the scientific name for the genus and species Cardamine pratensis), it is a brassica, and the young leaves were once added to salads for their peppery taste.
Nicholas Culpeper considered the plant almost the equal of water cress and noted in his Complete Herbal(1653) that ‘they are excellently good for the scurvy, they provoke urine, and break the stone, and excellently warm a cold and weak stomach, restoring lost appetite, and help digestion.’
Bittercresses like garlic mustard and the cuckoo flower are the main food for the larvae of the orange-tip (Anthocharis cardamines), an early spring butterfly. Eggs, which become orange, are laid on stalks under the buds, and once hatched the young caterpillars munch their way through the flowers and then the leaves, stems and any seed heads. Mustard oils in the plants are accumulated by the larvae to make them unpalatable to predators. With luck they overwinter as chrysalises before emerging around April to begin the cycle again.
Links to further information and images:
Wild your Garden with Joe Ashton
