May Wildflowers

This has been the most unfathomably long, cold spring, and although everything is looking very healthy and abundant and green in the garden, we have had the fewest flowers for the season of any year since we started here. To enhance and vary our somewhat meagre offering, we’ve been experimenting with picking some of the beautiful wildflowers which have found their way into our gardens, to see which have a long enough vase life to be of use as a cut flower. There have been some surprises. Yellow archangel, which grows plentifully in the bottom of our ancient hedge at home, has so far lasted for two weeks in a little glass bottle by the bed, picked when its flowers were mostly smudgy mustard-coloured ball-like buds, though now open all the way up the stem and enchantingly tiger-striped inside. A posy which Barney and Henry picked on their way home from school three weeks ago is still lingering in its vase on a windowsill, mostly gone to seed now, but with the clean white flowers of the stitchwort still fresh and bright. Pink campion seems to last for weeks on end, and has a long enough stem for us to be able to incorporate it into our bouquets by post. Forget-me-nots are a long standing favourite for this time of year, and inspired by a white kind seen in a friend’s garden, and a naturally sporting pink one which grows by our workshop, we’ve been sowing seeds of white and pink kinds for a bit more variety next year. One wildflower which I have always adored is shepherd’s purse, which I like for its long slender stems with little heart-shaped seed pods scattered all the way up, which later on shed to reveal tiny sheeny papery ovals, like miniature honesty seed cases. We collected seed last year from one flourishing plant, and a spring sowing has resulted in roughly a hundred vigorous little seedlings, which have been planted out into a bed. Some of the stems are ready for picking now, and they add lovely texture and softness to a bunch of late spring garden flowers.