Flora's happy end?

10:18am Thursday 28th August 2008

VAL BOURNE laments mown flowers loved since Shakespeare's day

The Japanese have a passion for Shakespeare as I'm sure you are aware. This year I witnessed a masterly troupe of actors singing The Rain it Raineth Every Day on an open-air stage during a monsoon in the Nagano mountains, a range commonly known as the Japanese Alps.

The actors rose to the occasion by inserting words related to rain such as wet, damp, pouring and soaking into Shakespeare's lines whenever possible. This caused great merriment to the English speakers in the audience. The nimble-footed band were also constantly dodging the ever-spreading puddles just in case the current from the electric lights made contact with their hose and doublet. This balletic display amused the Japanese audience greatly so 200 people tittered through the strangest Shakespeare medley I will ever witness.

Shakespeare makes many references to plants and it's said that he knew every wildflower in the local fields, woods and meadows close to Stratford-upon-Avon. His quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream sets the scene: "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows/ Where oxlips and nodding violets grow/ Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine/ With sweet musk roses and with eglantine."

Wild thyme (Thymus polytrichus) was a herb associated with fairies and it was thought that the very presence of the low-growing, pink flower would conjure them up. A Midsummer Night's Dream has to conjure up quite a few, including King Oberon and Queen Titania, and the field pansy provides the magic potion to make Titania fall in love with Bottom who has been given an ass's head by the mischievous Puck. Pansy takes its name from pensee which means to think. The cure was another plant, wormwood. In Shakespeare's day plants were potent weapons for good and evil and the audience would have understood every nuance.

To all accounts, wild thyme grew on the sunny side of chalky hills all around the shires in the Bard's day. However, these days wild thyme is on the Rare Plants Register in Shakespeare's Warwickshire and declining in Oxfordshire. John Killick, writer of The Plants of Oxfordshire in Weekend, tells me that "it's only present in 105 out of 596 recording squares (or tetrads). Like many plants in this habitat it is decreasing".

One of the saddest things for a plant lover like me is to witness the decline and mismanagement of local flora before my every eyes - and yet feel powerless to stop it. For example, I was driving up to my village along a steep-sided lane marbled with hard heads (Centaurea nigra) and field scabious (Knautia arvensis). Bumble bees abounded. But two weeks ago the steep verges were cut, splaying flower heads everywhere and leaving a brown swathe of grass and stems to rot back into the ground.

Of course the mowing shouldn't have happened until the seed was ripe to fall, if it needed doing at all. This 'flower massacre' happens every year, always just at the wrong time and wild bees must decline locally when this occurs. Bee numbers are something we gardeners have to worry about. Crops and seeds mostly need a pollinator and it's often a bumble bee. If pollinators disappear some of Shakespeare's favourite flowers could also go. Looking Good Agastache Black Adder' Heleniums with Agastache 'Blue Fortune' d=2,2,1The fuzzy spikes on this 4ft-high agastache show off orange heleniums brilliantly. This new blue-flowered variety has deep purple calices and dark stems and like all agastaches it thrives in well-drained soil in full sun. The flowers are a bee pleaser, the vertical seed heads endure in winter and the foliage is nicely aromatic.

Editor's choice