Nobody
calls them windflowers, either, though the link with anemometers is pleasing. The thing about wood anemones is that they get a very creditable bronze medal in the vernal woodland spectacle stakes, after bluebell, and, shooting up the charts in recent years, ramsons.
Arguably anemones beat both for sheer raw beauty, but only locally in Britain do they carpet the ground as much, sometimes content with just a scattering on a wood-bank, or occupying, say, a handful of car-parking spaces. In my mind they lay like snow only in the classic coppices of places like Kent and Suffolk, but who knows. I expect and hope they will suprise me one day in another, unexpected place.
Last year I found a fine old colony in a dene incised into Durham’s Magnesian limestone. The plants were large and healthy and had finished flowering, their seeds going from straw yellow to brown. I gathered some, scattered them in a pot, and had it outdoors over winter, hoping for seedlings. It was exciting, though none came this time. We all know about seeds, but apart from the weeds in the garden and the edge of the rapefield, we rarely get to see wild seedlings, especially those of the popular wildflowers, because above- and below-ground competition is so intense that they almost never make it. There is something thrilling about a globeflower seedling, or a clover seedling even, unable to summon up the resources for three leaflets until its second attempt.
Who knows how rare wood anemone seedlings really are? Cue the great under-recognised and gobsmacking topic of herb longevity. When it comes to old age it seems our nursery imaginations can’t escape being drawn, time and time again, to wizened old trees, their furrowed and twisted skins perhaps reminding of us of our own nonagenarians, children in comparison. But some studies suggest the shell-thin wood anemone passes the three-hundred year mark, their otherworldly black rhizomes pushing back through the a-horizons, conduits for George I, piracy, brutal woodland management.
I went back to the Magnesian Limestone this spring. On a rainy morning, there they were again, sheets of them, gone over, sheeny in the permeating drizzle under an arriviste sycamore canopy. Beside, on the dangerously steep slope, a recently used bivouac and two buckets, one fallen over. Someone had had a hell of a view, the tide of windflowers washing their feet in apology for the not-so-dim roar of the A690. I’ve no idea who they were, but clearly the anemones were providing something that neither Simon Cowell nor the Metrocentre were.