The Meadow Cranesbill are throwing their luminous blue throughout the top meadows where the soil is thin and limey. A violet-blue that is most vivid in the gloaming, once the sun goes down and before darkness and then again first thing in the dew of morning. Gathering in strength so that they now flood the crown of the top field, they extend their range by about four generous strides a year. Seed that is literally catapulted by the ingenious dispersal mechanism, shaped like a crane’s bill, which gives them their common name. Sit close on a still warm day when the seed is ripe and you hear it being flung from the parent plant, but catching a plant in the act is almost impossible and the reason it makes it difficult seed to gather.

Our neighbours, Jane and Donald, who grow wild seed commercially on the other side of the valley, have a strip of one field given over to Geranium pratense. It is vibrant in its intensity when planted en masse and my parent plants came from them as a tray of seedlings for my birthday 11 years ago. They were added to the top meadow that April and have proven to be a good way of introducing the cranesbill into the once-was pasture. We had already oversown the field with a local meadow mix that contained Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor), the semi-parasitic annual that lives in part off the grasses and is vital in restoring pasture to meadow. The rattle weakens its host enough for the floral content of a meadow to find a window of opportunity and my little plugs were found a place where the rattle seedlings were in evidence and the grass was already showing that it was weakened.