14-July Lost Cornfield Flowers & London’s Last Wild Orchids

At the edges of fields there were other smaller, brightly coloured flowers such as pheasant’s eye Adonis annua, heartsease Viola tricolor, scarlet pimpernel Anagallis arvensis and the fluellens Kickxia spp. Nowadays, we just tend to see a uniform straw colour, but there are still a few places where some of these old cornfield relics can still be found, especially at the edges of chalky fields in south east London and North Kent. Poppies, whose seed can remain viable in the soil for over forty years, still make the occasional shock appearance en masse. Some of these cornfield plants are so striking they have made their way to our gardens, but the triple-sized corncockle cultivars have none of the impact that drifts of wild ones must have done in the past.

At the edges of some fields it is still possible to find the round-leaved fluellen Kickxia spuria, sharp-leaved fluellen K. elatine, Venus’s looking glass Legousia hybrida, cornflower Centaurea cyanus as well as the vermillion and possibly even the blue form of scarlet pimpernel Angallis arvensis. As little as sixty years ago there were still reports of cornflowers turning fields blue.

What we are most likely to encounter now are poppies, clovers, trefoils, fumitories, bindweeds, mayweeds, as well as heartsease and the field pansy V. arvensis. Corn spurrey Spergula arvensis is still common enough, possibly because its seeds are usually present in commercially sold topsoil. In Roman times these seeds were eaten much as we eat oats today. Venus’s looking glass gets its unusual name from the gloss on its flat seeds, which were thought reminiscent of Roman mirrors.

The species that have gone, or almost gone, are corn marigold Chrysanthemum segetum, corncockle Agrostemma githago, corn gromwell Litho spermum arvensis, mousetail Myosurus minimus, pheasant’s eye and some cudweeds. Cudweeds Filago spp. are small and easily go unnoticed. They can be difficult to tell apart but include some great rarities.

Pheasant’s eye is regarded by many as the most beautiful of all these weeds. It has small anemone-like flowers which have an intensity of red, difficult to match. This can be seen to full effect in the hand tinted pictures in Curtis’s “Flora Londoniensis” which can be viewed in the Natural History Museum library. These drawings are thought by many to be the best drawings of English wild flowers ever made and his drawing of the pheasant’s eye is one of his best. In Greek mythology its flowers were thought to have first sprung from where the ill-fated youth Adonis’s blood fell. In the eighteenth century it was common enough and popular enough for bunches of it to be sold in Covent Garden flower market under the name of ‘Red Morocco’.

Orchids

Its flowers are more pointed than the rest. It is similar looking and the same height as the broad-leaved helleborine, but has a tendency to form clumps of several stems and has flowers that hang more. This orchid is very rare and best looked for in the beech and hornbeam woods on the chalk around Downe and Titsey.

Lastly, the marsh helleborine E. palustris is quite different in its preferences. It likes to grow in damp meadows and marsh but in our area seems to be confined to old chalk pits that have collected a little water. This species is what most people think an orchid should look like. It is tall, impressive, with a wide range of colours at times looking not unlike a miniature hothouse Cymbidium orchid. Wasps are one of its pollinators and they are said to lose their balance in the flower and end up leaving with pollen glued to their heads. Abandoned chalk quarries such as Swanscombe and Greys are the best places to look for them, if you can gain entry. Good chalk grassland is still reliable for common twayblades. Bee orchids can usually be seen on West Kent golf course. Marsh orchids i.e. early and southern marsh, due to their promiscuity, form many differently coloured hybrids. These can be difficult to identify but an interesting range of them can be seen on both Ashtead and Epsom commons.

Other beauties such as the lesser and greater butterfly and burnt tip orchid are now confined to the past. There could still be a slim chance of finding a violet helleborine E. purpurata. This orchid, like the ghost orchid, has almost mythical status among botanists. It is usually just the stems and leaf bases that are pure violet, the flowers being green and white. However, the holy grail of orchid hunters is to encounter the achlorophyllous form which has no chlorophyll whatsoever. In the deepest gloom of the darkest wood the great hope is to encounter a completely translucent milky-violet orchid. Those who have been fortunate enough to see one say it appears to glow.