Nature · Wildflowers & flowers

Cowslip

Flowers April to May

Primula veris — Primulaceae

The cowslip is the meadow primula: a single tall stem carrying a nodding, one-sided cluster of small, deep-yellow, tubular flowers above a rosette of crinkled leaves. Once as common as the buttercup in old grassland, it collapsed between about 1930 and 1980 as meadows were ploughed and sprayed, and has since recovered on unsprayed verges and village greens. It is the county flower of Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and Surrey.

How to spot them

▸One stout stem to about 25 cm, topped by a nodding umbel of up to thirty small flowers, usually leaning to one side
▸Flowers deep egg-yellow and distinctly tubular, the mouth narrow, with five orange spots in the throat
▸Crinkled, downy leaves that narrow abruptly — almost with a shoulder — into the stalk
▸Open sunny turf: chalk and limestone grassland, old meadows, railway banks and road verges, April to May
▸A faint apricot scent; pin-eyed and thrum-eyed forms as in the primrose

How to know it

A single tall stem carrying a nodding one-sided umbel of small, deep-yellow tubular flowers with orange spots in the throat

Cowslip — Primula veris.

Its specific epithet means 'of spring'; its English name probably comes from the Old English for cow dung

Primula veris — the name from cu-slyppe, 'cow slip' or cow pat, from where it grew in pasture.

Called paigle, and a bunch of keys — St Peter's keys, dropped at the gate of heaven

Cowslip — hence 'Our Lady's keys' and 'key flower'.

Ariel sings of lying in the bell of this flower in The Tempest

Cowslip — 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I, / In a cowslip's bell I lie.'

County flower of Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and Surrey; Plantlife records a steep decline from about 1930 to 1980

Cowslip.

Its flowers were the base of a country wine, and the leaves a salad herb; the heads were also bound into tossing balls called tisty-tosties

Cowslip wine and tisty-tosty balls.

Crossed with the woodland primula it gives a hybrid with large flat pale flowers, often mistaken for a rare East Anglian species

Primula × polyantha, the false oxlip — cowslip crossed with primrose, confused with the true oxlip, Primula elatior.

Quick-fire facts

•Family Primulaceae; veris means 'of spring'
•Plantlife records that cowslips were once as common as buttercups but declined steeply between about 1930 and 1980 with the loss of old grassland, ploughing and herbicides
•County flower of Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and Surrey in Plantlife's 2002 County Flowers survey
•The leaves narrow abruptly into the stalk; primrose leaves taper gradually — the surest vegetative difference
•Chief foodplant of the Duke of Burgundy butterfly along with the primrose
•Traditional names include paigle, peggle, key flower, Our Lady's keys and herb Peter
•Cowslip wine was a standard English country wine, and the flowers were used as a mild sedative in herbal medicine
•The North American 'cowslip' is a different plant — the marsh marigold, Caltha palustris

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

Plantlife — Cowslip
Woodland Trust — Cowslip (Primula veris)