Sex in the churchyard

After a morning meeting in Sleaford, I spent the rest of the day botanising in three Lincolnshire villages, which tend to be oases in the rather intensively arable landscape of huge wheat fields and scrappy, over-managed Enclosure Act hedges of much of south Lincolnshire.

I always make a bee-line for the churchyard, as this often contains fragments of species-rich grassland or woodland species such as primroses and violets. The churchyards at Silk Willoughby and Osbournby rewarded me with a reasonable suite of species, but at Aswarby I was met with close-mown improved grassland, devoid of any interest.

The churchyard at Silk Willoughby had a very impressive range of primroses. Many were the native type (Primula vulgaris subsp. vulgaris) with soft yellow flowers, but there were also a significant number of clear pink specimens, with a white band round the yellow centre, which I suspect are P.vulgaris subsp. sibthorpii. This subspecies becomes more frequent from Greece eastwards . It has been cultivated, it seems, since the early seventeenth century, when it was known as 'Tradescant's Turkie-Purple Primrose'. It is assumed to be one of the sources of different colours in garden primroses.

Certainly primroses are a promiscuous bunch, and have been busily cross-pollinating with gay abandon (with little heed to their sedate surroundings), giving rise to flowers of many different shades of pink. There also seems to be some evidence of the influence of garden Polyanthus around, as a number of the plants had multiple blooms on a single stem.