16.04.25 Cowslips and (False) Oxlips

Encouraged by the recent sunshine the garden meadows are resplendent with cowslips (Primula veris) and fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris). They flower at roughly the same time and look great together. Despite preferring different conditions – ideally dry, chalky slopes for the former and wet, grassy river meadows for the latter – they can be persuaded to grow together, or at least adjacent, to a certain extent.

I try to increase them every year, to emulate the wonderful Cricklade meadows, if on a smaller scale! This involves autumnal seed scattering for cowslips, but fritillaries take much longer from seed to flowering, so I plant bulbs. One could buy packets of them in autumn, but I fear a lot of these have dried and died already. I plant them "in the green" just before or just after flowering.

Cowslips absolutely thrived in my previous meadow in our Kenley garden, but here the soil is very heavy clay and they are increasing rather slowly. Numbers are good this year, perhaps because it has been a relatively dry winter.

In Kenley I noticed some oxlips dotted around. The oxlip (Primula vulgaris x veris or Primula x polyantha) is a natural hybrid between cowslip and primrose (Primula vulgaris), with broadly open, pale, primrose-like flowers on tall cowslip-like stems. They are quite commonly found wherever both parents are nearby, whether in gardens or in the wild. They are also one of the main stock plants behind the extensive breeding of Polyanthus primulas for the garden. What I have just described, however, is actually the false oxlip.

The true oxlip (Primula elatior) is a true-species plant occurring in the wild, and not a hybrid. In the U.K. it is uncommon, being confined mainly to ancient scraps of woodland on boulder clay where the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire meet. In continental Europe it is much more widely found. It has a rather "nodding" bunch of flowers that tend to be all on one side of the stem, whereas in the false oxlip the flowers stick up and out in all directions. Otherwise they look quite similar.

So don't be deceived! If you are out and about anywhere except East Anglia and you see an oxlip, it is most likely to be false.

Anthony.heys@sky.com