“When daisies pied and violets blue / And lady-smocks all silver-white, / And cuckoo-buds* of yellow hue, / Do paint the meadows with delight…”
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost, Act V, Scene II.

Spring is unfurling slowly this year, and one of its characteristic plants is coming into flower here in Norfolk –  Lady’s Smock or Cuckoo Flower, Cardamine pratensis.

This lovely plant can be found in damp meadows and grasslands and on roadsides, ditches and river banks throughout the British Isles. It is native throughout most of Europe and western Asia and northern North America. It is the county flower of both Cheshire and Brecknockshire.  (If you see the plant in the British Isles, you can submit records of sightings here.)

Cardamine pratensis has a basal rosette of pinnate leaves, each one 5 – 12 cm long with 3-15 leaflets. Each leaflet is about 1 cm long. In spring a blue-green stem grows upwards from the rosette and a head of delicate, small, pale pink or mauve flowers opens up at the top. Each flower has four petals, a characteristic of the Cabbage family, Brassicaceae, to which it belongs. Cuckoo Flower is the big brother of Hairy Bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta, a frequent occupant of flower pots, which I wrote about in February 2012.

A group of the plants in flower in damp grassland is a memorable and very lovely sight but after flowering and producing seeds, Cardamine pratensis lies dormant for the rest of the summer, so is easily missed later in the year. The plant grows in Earlham Cemetery in Norwich, where it put on a spectacular display in the cool spring of 2013.

Cardamine pratensis is called Cuckoo Flower (or Cuckooflower or Cuckoo-flower) because it comes into flower at roughly the time that the first Cuckoos arrive here in spring, although the plant can flower as early as March in a sheltered spot in a warm spring, or as late as June or even July in a cool, shady spot or on high ground. The Sixteenth Century herbalist John Gerard said that ‘These flower for the most part in April and May when the Cuckoo begins to sing her pleasant notes without stammering’. The plant can also be covered in “cuckoo spit“, the frothy mass produced by the nymphs of the Meadow or Common Froghopper, Philaenus spumarius.

According to “A Pocket Book of British Wild Flowers” by Charles A. Hall (1937, A. & C. Black) the name Lady’s Smock may be from a fancied likeness to chemises hung out to bleach, or from the plant’s dedication to the Virgin Mary: “Our Lady’s Smock”. However, “Flora Britannica” is more down to earth: the name Lady’s Smock is probably an allusion to certain activities that took place in springtime meadows. (“Smock” was a less than complimentary slang term for a woman, rather like a “bit of skirt”).

Other names include Milkmaids, Fairy Flower, May Flower, Coco Plant and Meadow Bittercress. The last name describes the plant’s close relationship with Hairy Bittercress and also the fact that it is edible. The leaves have a peppery taste, rather like Cress, Land Cress or Water Cress. If you have access to large quantities of the plant, you could substitute a few leaves in Hairy Bittercress recipes. The Eatweeds website has a recipe for Lady’s Smock and Three-cornered Leek Salad. You can also nibble on the flowers or flowerbuds, though it seems a shame to spoil the plant by doing so. The leaves are full of Vitamin C.

Cardamine pratensis is one of the foodplants of Orange-tip Butterfly caterpillars (Anthocharis cardamines). I saw my first Orange-tips of the year on Wednesday, in Thetford Forest in Norfolk. The ground there is mostly too dry for Cuckoo Flower, but the other main foodplant was growing – Garlic Mustard, Alliaria petiolata. The Hazel Tree website has some stunning photos of Orange-tips on Cuckoo Flower, which I recommend.

If your garden has soil that stays fairly damp, you could grow Cardamine pratensis, perhaps naturalised in grass. Other members of the genus make even better garden plants but our garden is too dry for them all, unfortunately. Cuckoo Flower even has double-flowered and hose-in-hose forms, if you like that sort of thing. (Both are found in the wild in parts of Devon.) The Seedaholic website gives tips for raising Cuckoo Flower plants from seed, which is best sown in late summer or early autumn. Seeds can be bought online from suppliers such as Crocus.

If you’re superstitious, beware of Cuckoo Flower! Picking the plant to bring indoors was sometimes discouraged in case it caused a thunderstorm to break out, or an adder bit the picker before the year was out. In Ireland it was sometimes believed that a human or animal born on May Day would have an Evil Eye, which could only be prevented by bathing the eye with the plant’s juice.
* Incidentally, the “cuckoo-buds” Shakespeare mentions are probably buttercup flowers.