Lady's smock Cardamine pratensis, the native wild flower also known as cuckoo flower, is a food plant for the delightful ....
...... orange tip butterfly, so if you plant it in a wildlife garden there's a good chance that orange tip butterflies will breed there. The fastest and easiest way to grow the plant is to propagate it from leaf cuttings and now is the ideal time to do that.
All you need to do is to remove a few leaves from as close to the base of a plant as possible, then lay them on wet potting compost in a flower pot and keep this in a polythene bag. Open the bag every couple of days and spray the leaves and surface of the compost with a water mist spray, so that they are permanently wet.
After two to three weeks you'll see little white roots sprouting from the leaflet bases and sometimes from their mid ribs.
Within another week shoots will begin to appear.
One leaf will often produce about twenty plants, with sometimes two appearing from each leaflet. When they are well rooted you can separate them into individual pots, then plant them out in the garden when they're well established. They like moist soil and will grow well in grass around a garden pond.
Occasionally double-flowered lady's smock plants appear in the wild and, since they set no seeds, these can only be propagated from leaf cuttings.
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