Nature to look out for in Burwell

Common mallow’s purply-pink flowers are out now along our roadsides and anywhere there is a bit of rough unkept ground. I admire the toughness of this rugged plant which responds to the regular cutting it often gets by ducking low, and sticking its flowers out close to the ground, as if to say, ‘I can’t be beaten’.

My aunt, Elsie, tells me the local name in the Fens for these flowers is ‘Pick-cheese’ as their fruits have the texture of soft cheese. They are edible, I am looking forward to trying one. Nearly two hundred years ago John Clare, the Northamptonshire ‘peasant poet’ wrote in ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’

‘The sitting down when school was oe’er,
upon the threshold by his door
Picking from mallows sport to please
each crumpled seed he called a cheese.’

I think John Clare too must have used the name Pick-cheese for these plants; some of our understanding of this poem would be lost if this local name had not been passed on to us through the generations. Thinking about this, I am struck how these simple wayside flowers give us a link to generations that have gone before us; generations who have enjoyed playing with the fruits of the mallow as a cheese. If our children no longer play this game, we are losing more than just a game. We lose a link to those who have gone before us, and a link forward to the generations to come. These rough flowers on our waysides offer us so much.

Common mallows also provide a feast to insects hungry for pollen. Tomorrow I will be writing about an insect with the most fabulous thighs that I caught tucking in…

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