A creeping aromatic mat with square stems, tiny paired oval leaves and dense heads of pinky-purple two-lipped flowers
Wild thyme — Thymus serpyllum, and in Britain usually Thymus drucei.
Nature · Wildflowers & flowers
Wild thyme
Flowers June to September
Thymus serpyllum — Lamiaceae
Wild thyme is the low aromatic mat of chalk downland, heath, dune and cliff, its dense heads of pinky-purple flowers releasing the kitchen-herb scent when trodden on. It is the plant on which Titania sleeps in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the plant on which the whole survival of the large blue butterfly turns: the caterpillar starts on its flower heads before being carried into a red ant's nest.
How to spot them
- ▸A creeping woody mat, rarely more than 10 cm high, smelling strongly aromatic when crushed
- ▸Tiny oval leaves in opposite pairs along square, four-angled stems — a mint-family giveaway
- ▸Dense rounded heads of small two-lipped pinky-purple flowers, June to September
- ▸Short turf on chalk, limestone, heath, dune and cliff, and on anthills
- ▸Grows in sun-baked, grazed, thin soil, often on the warm south side of an ant hill
How to know it
Titania's bank in A Midsummer Night's Dream is where this plant blows, with oxlips and the nodding violet
Wild thyme — 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows'.
The large blue butterfly's caterpillar eats its flower heads before being adopted by Myrmica sabuleti ants
Wild thyme — the butterfly went extinct in Britain in 1979 and was reintroduced from Sweden.
Its mint-family relatives yield the antiseptic phenol thymol, used in mouthwash and once in Listerine
Wild thyme — the genus Thymus, family Lamiaceae.
British plants of it are usually separated as a distinct species named after the botanist George Claridge Druce
Thymus drucei, also treated as Thymus polytrichus — the wild thyme of British grassland.
A grazed-turf aromatic so bound to warm bare ground that it is most often found on the sunny slopes of yellow meadow ant hills
Wild thyme — which is why its ant and its butterfly occur together.
Its creeping epithet means 'creeping', and its English name is shared with the kitchen herb of Mediterranean scrub
Thymus serpyllum; the culinary herb is Thymus vulgaris.
Quick-fire facts
- •Family Lamiaceae, the mints and deadnettles — square stems and opposite leaves
- •The Wildlife Trusts give the British plant as Thymus polytrichus, flowering June to September in chalk grassland, short pasture, cliffs and rocky places; many floras now use Thymus drucei
- •Thymus serpyllum in the strict sense is Breckland thyme, a rarity of East Anglian sandy heath
- •The culinary herb of the kitchen is the different Mediterranean species Thymus vulgaris
- •Butterfly Conservation records the large blue as having become extinct in Britain in 1979 and been successfully reintroduced from continental Europe
- •Large blue larvae feed first on wild thyme flower heads, then are taken into nests of the ant Myrmica sabuleti, where they eat ant grubs
- •Titania's speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II scene i, begins 'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows'
- •Thymol, the aromatic phenol of thyme oil, is a powerful antiseptic and was the original active ingredient of several mouthwashes
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Sources
- The Wildlife Trusts — Wild thyme
- Butterfly Conservation — Large Blue