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.
It is a very good feeling to have set a such a thing in motion and the Meadow Cranesbill is now a mainstay in the meadow and valuable for following through after buttercups and providing as much of a moment in blue. The gift of a hundred or so seedlings is now responsible for the several thousand that have made the top meadow their home and it is interesting to chart the extension of their domain. We cut the meadows in mid-August, which is late in order to allow the orchids time to seed, and the remote plants that have found a new place away from the naturally flung colony must have been moved about as we raked the hay. Each plant that appears on its own has an invisible map that you can see playing out into the future in your mind’s eye. One plant leading to an extended colony that, in time, will meet others to provide the volume of blue that makes the meadow a destination at dusk.
In March next year, as the rosettes come to life, I will lift a few plants to introduce into other fields where we don’t yet have them, but I am saving a couple of places for the beautiful variants. Another gift of Geranium pratense var albiflorum ‘Silver Queen’ has been bulking up in the stock beds to divide and put specifically into the banks below the house. The palest of silvery blues, it sits well with the wild scabious and seems to be variable, with seedlings that range in the intensity of grey-blue veining.
A pure white seedling sprung spontaneously from the ‘Silver Queen’ in the stock beds. Exactly four paces from the mother plant and a reminder that it is always good to have some stock bed space in which you can experiment. A place to observe habits, good or bad or, in this case, the surprise of an albino. I plan to split the white seedling in the spring and put the splits amongst the moon daisies to build a white colony above the pond where they will be equally happy on the heavy soil. White on white, if they do what I hope for, or a reversion to blue that I will be equally happy to see. As the whites are rare, a mother plant will be held in the stock beds to bulk and seed and perhaps throw me a surprise or two for my patience.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 6 July 2024