Yellow Rattle amongst the grass and Ox-eye daisies
Yellow rattle seed is often scattered on grassland at the start of a wild flower meadow project. The plant is semi-parasitic on grass roots, leaching nutrients (hence an alternative name ‘poverty’), and so helps to moderate the vigour of grass growth, allowing slower-growing wild flowers to establish more readily.
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| Immature seed cases |
After sowing some seed last autumn you will see yellow rattle now in flower both at QEII and on the Winding-Hole Meadow. Before the early autumn scything we will collect this year’s seed from the brown pod cases and scatter it more widely after collecting the arisings for composting.
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| Flowers and mature pods |
As its name suggests, when the papery pods are mature, brown and dry a shake gives the sound of a rattle. The plant also goes by a wealth of other folk names, many found in Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Yellow Rattle Poverty’: fiddlecase, shacklebasket, hayshackle, pots ‘n’ pans, rattlejack, pepperbox, cockscomb, hen penny, shepherd’s coffin, snaffles and poverty. (The poem was first published in his book Walking Home in 2012).
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