Wild About Flowers

Lady’s slippers by the hundreds if not thousands, hillsides golden with daisies, swards of salvias: Sarah Raven salutes Bob Gibbons, who has dedicated the best part of his life to finding and documenting wildflowers

- Bob Gibbons

WE have an interesting relationship with ‘wild’ flowers. Filming a mini BBC series on pollinators 10 years ago, I watched what people did when walking through city meadows in full flower. Wild annuals had been sown in a series of semi dilapidated, inner-city spaces in Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. Everyone loved the abundance, but, more than that, the vandalism, graffiti and drug-taking had, at least from those places, totally disappeared.
Some very occasionally picked a small posy to take home (which was encouraged), but no one, in any of the sites, had trashed the flowers. No one biked through them or stamped them down. People dropped far less litter—the meadows were left pretty pristine.

Flowery abundance brings out the best in us and we have a similar reaction to meadows in the wild. We seem to feel younger, more joyful, even elated, when we come across a proliferation of wildflowers. People who have hardly noticed flowers in their whole life are overcome and travel miles to get another ‘fix’. It becomes addictive because it makes us feel so good.

I became an addict as a child when I was taken, at the age of seven, by my botanist father to see the thrift and sea lavender on the Norfolk coast, a couple of hours from where we lived. We followed up with snakeshead fritillaries in the Thames valley at Cricklade and then the mass of miniature pansies and marigolds on the machair in the Outer Hebrides. Later, he took me to see the richness of geraniums, gentians and orchids in the limestone pavements of the Burren in western Ireland and, further afield, we found swathes of crocuses and aconites on the snowline in the Italian Dolomites and roadside cliffs full of the widow iris, Hermodactylus tuberosa, in Corfu.

I now know that wildflower abundances make me feel deeply relaxed and, at the same time, exhilarated and I gather that, for many people, it’s exactly the same.