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There has been some debate about whether cornflowers Centaurea cyanus are native to the British Isles. According to the New Atlas of the British Flora there is archaeological evidence that they have been here since the Iron Age. They have certainly acquired a range of regional common names, usually an indicator of long-term presence; John Gerard in his Herbal of 1633 lists Blew-bottle, Blew-blow, Corn-floure and Hurt-sickle, the latter referring to the way in which the tough stems blunt the edges of sickles and scythes in cornfields.
It has been part of the landscape long enough to acquire numerous regional names. Geoffrey Grigson, in The Englishman's Flora, lists twenty five, including Witch Bells and Witch's Thimble, which were used here in northern England.
It was once as common as poppies in corn fields, until improved methods of seed cleaning and then, in the last decades of the 20th. century, modern herbicides rendered it a rare sight in arable fields. There are now few naturally self-sustaining populations in the wild.
It was always an unpopular plant with farmers. Gerard describes how it 'hindereth and annoyeth the reapers, by dulling and turning the edges of their sickles in reaping the corn'.
George Sinclair, gardener to the Duke of Bedford, writing at the height of the agricultural revolution in the 1840s, describes it as being amongst a class of weeds [which also included corn poppy. mayweed, corn marigold and charlock] that ' with their gaudy colours, like heralds of spring and summer, proclaim bad farming to the landlord, the tenant and the passenger; and announce the neglect of using clean seed-corn, judicious manuring, fallowing, the row culture, and horse-hoe husbandry'.
Today it's mostly grown as a garden flower, usually as the the wild blue form although even in Gerard's day white, pink and double cultivars were also known in gardens. It makes a very attractive cut flower.
The best displays are in cornfield weed wild flower plantings, like this one established by the Woodland Trust at Low Burnhall farm near Durham city a few years ago, when the arable land was being replanted with native trees.
For a year or two the display of cornflower, corncockle,corn marigold, corn poppy and mayweed was simply stunning - and a reminder of the appearance of cornfields in the landscape before the advent of modern farming techniques.
I've often wondered why bloody cranesbill Geranium sangineum is so-called, because the flower is magenta, not the colour of blood at all. According to Richard Mabey, in his Flora Britannica, the name originally referred to the redness of the stalks, but it seems odd that they should take prerefence over the flowers in the naming of the plant. Anyway, this one is fairly typical ......
....... but this one is much bloodier. Still not the colour of real blood, but closer to it.
This single red-hued plant grows amongst the typical ones on the cliffs at Seaham on the Durham coast.
A couple of years ago I collected seed from it and some of the plants are flowering in the garden this year, but so far they are all magenta blooms.
So now I'm going to try rooting a side shoot from a small cutting.
Interesting varieties of wild flowers were the mainstay of gardens in these islands long before exotic species were introduced from overseas, and often appear on the decorative borders of medieval manuscripts, so bringing this variety into cultivation will be a continuation of a long-established horticultural tradition.
This year, for the first time, scarlet lily beetles Lilioceris lilii appeared in my garden. There were only two, which turned out to be a male and a female, and they came with some lily bulbs imported from Holland that I bought in a supermarket.
Being curious, I kept them under observation in a jam jar and soon discovered why these lovely insects are considered to be such notorious pests.
They mated overnight and by the next day had begum to lay rows of their round-ended, cylindrical eggs on the lily leaves that I supplied to them.
The adult beetles are formidable eaters, quickly nibbling holes in the edges of leaves that I gave them to feed on, but the grubs, when they hatched a few days later, were in a different league altogether.
They quickly began chewing holes in leaves and half a dozen of them could demolish a lily leaf in less than a couple of hours.
But, most remarkably, they did this while covering themselves in their own frass, which camouflaged them as bird droppings. This one has only just begun to anoint itself but they quickly became completely hidden in a mound of their own droppings.
From a gardener's perspective, these are extremely destructive insects and I can quite see why, in the worst affected parts of the country, gardeners have had to give up growing lilies.
These gaudy insects have spread from their native Eurasia throughout most of the temperate northern hemisphere. They first appeared in England in a Surrey garden in 1939 and by 1943 had reached the United States. Their spread northwards in England, and now into Scotland, has been rapid in the last decade, no doubt helped by a wholesale and retail distribution system for lily bulb sales that has ensured that they can reach every part of the United Kingdom.
I never once saw them attempt to fly. If you disturb the adults they just fall off the plant and pretend to be dead until the danger has passed.
The Royal Horticultural Society has a very good web page devoted to these insects and is also conductiing a survey of their spread, although I have to say the words 'horse', 'bolted' and 'stable door' come to mind!
These two individuals were the only ones that appeared in the garden and my lilies are doing fine, almost flowering in fact, but I wonder whether I'll be so lucky in future years
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