Among the blooming legends of field and hedgerow is an enchanting, near ubiquitous plant that is seen, admired and forgotten. The prettiest of flowers with the ugliest of appellations, its unfortunate name after an unpleasant medical condition might explain why it is so rarely lauded. If bluebells had been found to have pandemic-busting properties, would we then say woods in spring are carpeted with covids? Such an unkind fate has befallen the field scabious.
These bobbing barometers of the breeze on overlong stalks are bunched like florists’ sprays along a bare remnant of hedge. No two plants are alike for they cannot agree on a colour – will they show blue, pink or lilac? Not that the insects care. Last month, I inhaled a noseful of vanilla and a dozen or so black pollen beetles, sucked up out of the folds of a floret.
Today, all sorts are in dancing attendance or riding the pompoms for nectar – bumblebees, hoverflies, small skippers and peacock butterflies. And this plant has so much to give them and for so long, pinking and purpling from June right through until autumn, each one throwing up 50 or more flowers for public consumption. Even as one flower drops its petals in July, half a dozen more deep green, raspberry-like successors are preparing to claim the sun in August.
So where does that name come from? It is said that 17th-century botanists took a physician’s leaf out of an ancient Greek’s book, subscribing to the view that human ailments could be cured by turning to the plant that looked most like the affected body part (sometimes with fatal results). For every eyebright or toothwort, there is a scabious. It is said that the hairy stem resembled scabs on the skin.
And so field scabious acquired its insalubrious tag, with tinctures of the plant no doubt dabbed on the swollen buboes of soon-to-be plague victims. Maybe the Stuarts had a different take on wounds, but I can’t see the likeness.
Surely it is time for a field rebranding? Plantlife offers “ladies’ pincushion”, but perhaps that resonates with ladies of a certain age? Me, I go for the pompom.
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