Bouquets of flowers that nip seeds in the bud

PRIMROSES and cowslips are among the most popular of our spring wildflowers, although sadly both species are far less common than they used to be.

Although they are closely related plants and both prefer soil with a bit of lime in it, they can co-exist because they have different ecological preferences.

The primrose is originally a woodland plant, although today it’s commonly found at the base of hedgerows or along shady road verges. It flowers early in the spring to utilise the extra sunlight before most of our deciduous trees have broken bud.

The cowslip, on the other hand, is a meadow flower, not particularly shade tolerant, which flowers in the late spring.

But everything is a bit topsy-turvy this year because of the mild weather and higher than normal soil temperatures. Cowslips in the Midlands have flowered about a month earlier than usual and both species are in bloom at the same time.

One of the best places to find them is along canal banks. Even where our canals cross acid peat bogs their banks and the paths along them are constructed of crushed limestone which provides the soil conditions that primroses prefer, and which cowslips do to an even greater extent. I’ve been travelling slowly along the Grand Canal in my boat recently and every now and again I’d spot a particularly showy plant which had the tall stalk topped with multiple flower heads of the cowslip but the larger and more open flowers of the primrose. I’ve occasionally found these in the past but they are particularly abundant this year. I’d assumed they were oxlips. But a bit of research suggested that oxlips are not found in Ireland.

What they are, in fact, is a hybrid between the primrose and the cowslip — a hybrid which seems to carry the best characteristics of both species. Wild cowslips have declined hugely in numbers in my lifetime. There is a fairly simple reason for this — they will not tolerate artificial fertilisers and are sensitive to grazing and mowing cycles. There is a large meadow near my house that twenty years ago was ten-acres of yellow in early May. One year the farmer who owns it sprayed it with fertiliser. Since then not a single cowslip has grown in it. Luckily a few plants migrated on to my land, which is never fertilised, and they have survived and spread there. I look after my cowslip camp.

Primroses have not declined quite as dramatically but their numbers are dropping. The reasons for this are a bit more complicated but some research has been done on it in Britain. Habitat loss is one factor. Suitable hedgerows have been destroyed in order to enlarge fields or facilitate developments such as roads and buildings. Changes in woodland management practices have also had an effect.

But, British studies have shown that a significant factor in the decline of both species has been people digging them up to replant or even just picking bunches of wildflowers. It’s easy to forget that a flower is the reproductive organ of a plant that will eventually turn into the seed head that the plant needs to propagate itself. Every bunch of flowers is hundreds, or even thousands, of seeds that will never happen. I’ve had to bite my tongue a few times when some charming little girl has appeared with a bunch of cowslips to present to her mother. It’s all to easy to end up sounding like a crusty old curmudgeon.

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