Ragged and dishevelled

There's an uncultivated area I visit sometimes where the boggy land supports  an interesting array of plants including this ragged robin with its dishevelled petals. Lychnis flos-cuculi  (the generic name has been changed  to Silene  I find - it's irritating when this happens because its not so easy to shift a Latin binomial embedded in one's mind since childhood). Flos-cucili, the specific name means cuckoo flower - not to be confused with the other cuckoo flower Cardamine pratensis aka milkmaids. (When once the sound of the cuckoo resounded through the land  "In May I sing night and day", it must have felt natural to refer to that time of the year by the predominant bird call.

Anyway, ragged because - well, those petals appear to have been shredded, giving the flowers a dishevelled appearance. They remind me of my younger grandddaughter's  hair which has never, as far as I am aware, encountered a comb in all her very nearly two years. Her dishevellment doesn't detract in any way from her charm and beauty and nor does the  ragged robin's.

Dishevelled - now there's an intriguing word. It comes I find from the French and originally meant  both messy-haired and hairless. Odd. 
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disheveled

This reminds me of my father's story about being left as a child in Munich around 1902 or 3. The rest of the family and household having dispersed for one reason or another his father paid a nurse to look after the boy while he, the father, went away on business.The nurse immediately took the cash and ran leaving my father, aged 10 or 11, to fend for himself on the streets, a state of affairs that suited the boy very well. On returning after several weeks his father saw a dishevelled street urchin  hanging around the door and was about to give it a coin when the child said "Father, it's me!" He  was taken inside and placed on a sheet on the floor to have his head shorn, so lousy was his hair:  dis - cheveux-ed in both senses.

Where was I? In that boggy area which is actually a piece of common land although few may know that.I do so only because because I once checked the map of Common Land in Pembrokeshire. There are orchids there too, bog cotton, lousewort, many rabbits and a sheet  of corrugated tin under which lives, in late spring and summer, a snake. It was there today but moved so quickly that I could barely tell it was an adder, let alone press my camera shutter before it uncoiled and disappeared.Just like memories in the  ageing brain.

The prevalence of ragged robin  declined considerably during the 20th century as farmland was drained to improve pasture but rewilding initiatives are responsible for a revival. I was excited to read about the new scheme in Dorset.