The daughter of the winds

The name anemone, which is derived from Greek, literally means 'the daughter of the winds' and the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder believed that spring winds were essential to bring anemones into flower. You certainly need a still, windless day to photograph these  delightful spring flowers, that shiver on their slender stalks if there is the slightest breeze. 

Wood anemones are grow very slowly, spreading via creeping rhizomes, so woodlands with large patches of this flower are likely to be very old. It sets few viable seeds and spreads at a rate of about six feet in one hundred years, according to Richard Mabey in his Flora Britannica. It's plants like this that highlight the foolishness of the government's proposed practice of allowing developers to 'offset' destruction of  old-established woodlands by planting new ones on open fields.  Assuming it was possible, it would take centuries to replicate the drifts of wood anemones that are one of the defining features of ancient woodlands.

This seems to have been an exceptionally good spring for wood anemone, with some wonderful displays in woodlands in Weardale and Teesdale.

Perfect Weather for Windflowers

Bright and breezy today, perfect weather for the wood anemones Anemone nemorosa, which are in full flower in woodlands around Durham city. Its scientific name comes from the Greek word for wind, anemos, and when a gust blows across the woodland floor thousands of anemone flowers shiver on flower stalks that are as slender as a thread. Many modern books on British wild flowers repeat the story that the Roman naturalist Pliny (c. 77AD) believed that it was the wind that brought anemones into bloom in the spring ("The flower never opens, except while the wind is blowing, a circumstance to which it owes its name"); however, it wouldn't have been this species that he had in mind, but the far more robust, scarlet-flowered Anemone coronaria that blooms throughout the eastern Mediterranean in spring. Pliny's writings are fascinating source of natural history information, some of it fanciful, some of it accurate and perceptive. You can consult them on-line at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Plin.+Nat.+toc