Cuckooflower
Cardamine pratensis
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Lady's smock — it flowers when the cuckoo arrives, and feeds the orange-tip's caterpillars.
A slender perennial of damp grassland with pinnate leaves and loose spikes of four-petalled flowers in pale lilac-pink or nearly white. Cuckooflower grows in damp meadows, marshy pasture, ditch sides and wet verges around Dumfries, often in drifts, and its flowering coincides with the return of the cuckoo — hence both the name and the timing.
Behaviour
It is the principal foodplant of the orange-tip butterfly, whose eggs are laid singly on the flower stalks, and is also used by the green-veined white. Cuckooflower can reproduce vegetatively as well as by seed: small plantlets form on the leaves, root where they touch damp ground and grow into new plants. It has declined with the drainage of wet meadows.
When to see it
Quick facts
- Family
- Cabbages (Brassicaceae)
- Height
- 15–60 cm
- Status
- Native; declining with the loss of wet meadow
Photo by Ermell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons