“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.” – Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There” (1949).
Pasque Flower, Pulsatilla vulgaris
Last week, on impulse, we took the train to Royston in Hertfordshire to see Pasque Flowers, Pulsatilla vulgaris. Some magnificent photos on Twitter tempted us to make the trip.
We know Therfield Heath quite well, from summer visits to see butterflies (especially Chalkhill Blues and Marbled Whites), but this was our first visit in spring and we were going to a different part of the Heath, further away from Royston. It took us about an hour to walk to the site, known as Church Hill (note 1). On the open Heath there were patches of Cowslips. We skirted the edge of the golf course and walked through woods full of Cuckoo Pint in full flower.
A Glorious Sight
Pasque Flowers, Pulsatilla vulgaris, on Church Hill, near Royston.
“Pasque” means “like Paschal” – of Easter. We saw ours on the Tuesday after Easter. This year the flowers had probably reached their peak of flowering a few days before but the hillside was still a glorious sight.
The sheer number of flowers was impressive but individual Pulsatilla vulgaris plants are well worth a closer look. Pasque Flowers are short, hairy plants with feathery leaves at the base and finely-divided hairy leaf-like bracts below the flower. The flowers are deep violet to purple and nod downwards and sideways from the stem, with golden yellow anthers in their centres. What look like six flower ‘petals’ are actually petaloid sepals, arranged in an inner and outer group of three apiece (note 2).
Several plants were starting to produce seed heads – achenes with long, feathery plumes – which are decorative in themselves, “a little like feather dusters“.
Pasque Flowers, Pulsatilla vulgaris, with seed heads.
Church Hill is considered to be one of the top five places to see Pasque Flowers in the British Isles and over 60,000 plants were seen in a recent count.
The site copes with quite large numbers of visitors: the top of the slope had a rope laid on the grass to mark the edge of the flowers and a path across the hillside gave a good view of the plants from above and below. It even had a one way system to avoid the need to step off the path to let others pass.
Church Hill: rope and path. (Not all visitors were interested in the Pasque Flowers!)
Appropriately, the Pasque Flower is the county flower of Hertfordshire. It is also the county flower of Cambridgeshire, which is where I saw my very first Pasque Flower in June 1983, at Barnack Hills and Holes, near Peterborough (note 3). I was on a week’s Second Year Botany field trip from Aberdeen University, which included my first visit to Norfolk – to Scolt Head Island. The superb nature reserves and plants I encountered that week were a major reason why I moved south two years later.
A Scarce and Declining Flower
Pulsatilla vulgaris is a perennial plant in the Ranunculaceae (Buttercup family) and was once known as as Anemone pulsatilla. (I wrote about its relative the Wood Anemone, Anemone nemorosa, in May 2013.) The names are related: Anemone means “daughter of the wind” and Pulsatilla means “quiverer”, from the sixteenth-century German botanist Otto Brunfels’s description of the plant’s movements in the wind.
The Pasque Flower has a very restricted range in the British Isles. Plants need plenty of light and short, calcareous grassland and prefer relatively shallow soils (5 – 15 cm deep). Pasque Flowers are confined to a narrow belt of chalk from Cambridgeshire to Berkshire and two pockets of oolitic limestone, one in Gloucestershire and the other extending from Northamptonshire to Lincolnshire (note 4).
Pulsatilla vulgaris is classified as Vulnerable on the Vascular Plant Red Data List for Great Britain, is a Priority Species under the UK Post-2010 Biodiversity Framework and is listed as Near Threatened on the global IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Luckily individual plants are tough and long lived, as establishment of plants from seed is thought to be rare in Britain and colonisation of new sites is unknown (note 5). The Online Plant Atlas shows the plant’s distribution in the British Isles.
In 1750 Pasque Flowers grew at 130 sites in the British Isles but the enclosure and ploughing-up of grasslands and urbanisation have taken their toll. As long ago as 1825 the poet John Clare had noticed losses: “it … grows on the roman bank agen swordy well and did grow in great plenty but the plough that destroyer of wild flowers has rooted it out of its long inherited dwelling” (note 6). 16 Pasque Flower sites have gone in the last fifty years. There are now just 17 sites left.
Pasque Flowers sometimes grow on old earthworks, such as barrows and boundary banks. This led to the legend that the plants sprang from the blood of Romans or Danes, giving the plant then alternative names of Dane’s Blood or Dane’s Flower. The real explanation was that Pasque Flowers survived in these places because they were difficult to plough, as well as having the right chalkiness and short grass.
But even at a protected site the survival of Pasque Flowers depends on keeping the grass short enough. Nutrient enrichment and a lack of grazing can result in the plants being outcompeted and shaded out. Numbers of flowering plants can vary considerably from year to year and there is a sharp fall in flower production when the average height of the vegetation reaches 10 – 15 cm. Sites are best managed by grazing during the winter months, to produce a short, herb-rich sward.
Further afield, Pulsatilla vulgaris is found in calcareous areas of north-west Europe from Sweden in the north to central France in the south, and as far as the Ukraine in the east but the plant is declining in many areas as the amount of grazing is reduced. Our subspecies, Pulsatilla vulgaris subsp. vulgaris is replaced by subspecies grandis in Eastern Europe.
A Good Garden Plant
“…a fair claim to being the most dramatically and exotically beautiful of all English plants.” –Geoffrey Grigson, “The Englishman’s Flora”.
Although it is rare in the wild, Pulsatilla vulgaris makes a very good garden plant and has been given a RHS Award of Garden Merit. It is a great plant for rockeries and containers and doesn’t mind growing in an exposed site. It is very hardy (note 7) and long-lived but needs a sunny spot in well drained soil. If you have room, grow several for additional impact. There are several stockists online, such as Naturescape, which sells Pasque Flowers in pots.
The Seedaholic website has lots of useful information about growing Pasque Flowers. It includes the information that if plants are left with wet roots over winter they are likely to rot and die. I grew a variety with white flowers (var. ‘Alba’) in our back garden and it survived for several years and coped well with our sandy soil but our garden is north-facing and I think the shade and damp of winter led to its eventual demise.
John Good’s article “Pasque Flower Gems for the Alpine Garden” is well worth a read, on the Alpine Garden Society website. It gives lots of information on growing Pasque Flowers, on different varieties of Pulsatilla vulgaris and on other species of Pulsatilla (note 8).
You may become addicted to growing Pasque Flowers. Pulsatilla alpina subspecies apiifolia has pale yellow flowers; others are pink or white. There is even a book, “Pasque-Flowers: The Genus Pulsatilla”, by Christopher Grey-Wilson (published in 2014).
If you grow Pasque Flowers, it would be interesting to see which insects visit the flowers. When we visited Church Hill we saw a queen Red-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) visiting the flowers. We saw a Red-tailed Mason Bees (Osmia bicolor) but it was visiting yellow Asteraceae flowers, not Pulsatilla vulgaris. There might have been more visitors on a sunnier day.
The Plants For A Future website lists various uses of Pasque Flowers, though given its rarity you’d need to use cultivated ones rather than wild plants.
Pasque Flowers are not edible. Like many other members of the Ranunculaceae the plant contains the unstable glucoside ranunculin, which is rapidly broken down into protoanemonin when a plant is damaged (or picked). The flowers yield a green dye and the whole plant has been used medicinally (note 9). Repeated handling of the plant can apparently cause skin irritation in some people.
My advice is to look, but don’t touch, but do grow this wonderful plant and see it growing in the wild if you can.
Notes
Note 1 – Church Hill is marked as “Pen Hill” on the 1:50 000 scale Cambridge & Newmarket map and is on the western edge of the sheet. It’s roughly a two mile walk from Royston station, on top of a two hour train trip from Norwich, changing train in Cambridge.
Note 2 – The ever reliable Wild Flower Finder website has some good photos, as has the Pictorial guide to the flora of the British Isles.
Note 3 – Most Pasque Flowers bloom from March to May. I’m pretty certain I saw at least one flower in June, albeit a late one. (The Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora says “Plants can be found in flower from the middle of March to late June, but the main period of flowering is from about 6 April to 20 May”.) I would certainly have seen the seed heads.
Barnack remains a good place to see Pasque Flowers, though it is less convenient for me to reach than Royston.
Note 4 – Pasque Flowers used to grow on Magnesian limestone in northern England as well. Richard Mabey’s “Flora Britannica” (page 44; Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996) mentions that “a few flowers … cling on in short turf on the Magnesian limestone of West Yorkshire” but by 2020 there was apparently just a single wild plant left.
The plant is sometimes referred to in one word as the Pasqueflower, or as the European Pasqueflower and Common Pasqueflower.
Note 5 – From “Harrap’s Wild Flowers: A Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of Britain & Ireland”, page 30. Simon Harrap (Bloomsbury, 2013).
The Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora says “Plants produce viable seed, but seedling establishment is rare”. Plants reproduce “mostly vegetatively, by the growth of adventitious buds on the rhizome which form small daughter rosettes near to the mother plant”.
Note 6 – Letter to his publisher, 25th March 1825. Sadly, John Clare never wrote a poem about the plant.
Note 7 – Its UK hardiness rating is H5: “hardy in most places throughout the UK even in severe winters (-15 to -10C)”.
Note 8 – John Good’s article gives the total as 36 species; Oxford University says “around 30” and Wikipedia gives Kew Gardens’ count as 42 species as of April 2020.
Note 9 – The Wild Flower Finder website warns that Eating Pasque Flowers could result in diarrhoea, vomiting, hypotension, convulsions and coma, possibly leading to death. So don’t!
