Of Tittypines And Tisty-Tosty

Once believed capable of banishing wrinkles and revealing fairy gold, the dainty cowslip has clung on despite agricultural upheaval, finds Ian Morton

- Ian Morton

COWSLIP: the very name conjures up images of pastoral calm, sunny green meadows, humming insects, rural maidens filling their aprons with the soft, bunched heads of yellow umbels, bovine breath and the moist mouths of grazing cattle. The name’s origin, however, concerned the other end of the cow.

Our Anglo-saxon forebears, whose old English language endured from the mid 5th century until the Norman Conquest, called the flower cu-sloppe or cow dung, a druidic tribute to the enrichment of the grassland where the plant reliably and abundantly emerged each spring. it is, perhaps, the only species named after fertiliser.

Widespread throughout temperate Europe and the Near East, ithad friends in many regions, who found far more attractive names for it. pliny the Elder praised Primula veris for its heartening spring arrival. The huddled and drooping blooms with a vague similarity to a bunch of keys led Norse mythology to dedicate them to Freya, the key virgin whose worship might gain admission to her treasure palace.

The association transferred to the Virgin Mary and earned the cowslip such titles as our Lady’s keys and Mary’s tears. A medieval legend had it that st peter fumbled the celestial keys, which fell to Earth, cowslips springing up to provoke another set—thus st peter’s herb, herb peter, petrella, keys of heaven and keyflower. other names reflected the plant’s long recognised medicinal virtues. As a treatment for palsy, cramp, insomnia, nervous debility and giddiness, homely infusions of palsywort —sometimes referred to by its classical identities as Herba paralysis or arthritica— were administered as a sedative.