The snakes are out!

The snake's head fritillary Fritillaria meleagris is very near the top of my list of our most beautiful native flowers.
However, Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, exuberant aristocrat and co-creator of the glorious gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, was of a quite different mind calling it "a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay."

In her 1926 poem, The Land  she had this to say:
.....
"And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls
Camping among the furze, staining the waste
With foreign colour, sulky-dark and quaint,
Dangerous too, as a girl might sidle up,
An Egyptian girl, with an ancient snaring spell,
Throwing a net, soft round the limbs and heart,
Captivity soft and abhorrent, a close-meshed net,
—See the square web on the murrey flesh of the flower—
Holding her captive close with her bare brown arms.
Close to her little breast beneath the silk,
A gipsy Judith, witch of a ragged tent,
And I shrank from the English field of fritillaries
Before it should be too late, before I forgot
The cherry white in the woods, and the curdled clouds,
And the lapwings crying free above the plough."