Happy New Year!

It’s New Year’s Day, the eighth day of Christmas, on which our true love is supposed to send us eight maids a-milking. So let’s use that as a welcome opportunity to look forward to the spring with a gallery of spring flowers.

Milkmaids is one of the many common names of Cardamine pratensis, a spring-flowering plant that loves our damp meadows and stream edges. In Wiltshire we know it more often as lady’s smock or, because it flowers when the cuckoo returns to Britain, as cuckoo flower.

Milkmaids belongs to the brassica family and is an unlikely close cousin to the Brussel sprouts you probably ate with your turkey, on Christmas Day. All brassicas, even Brussel sprouts, are easily identified by their flowers which have only four petals, arranged as a cross, with six yellow stamens at its centre. Like most brassicas, Cardamine pratensis is edible, the leaves and flowers adding a peppery edge to an early summer salad.

Thank you for all your support during 2023 and here’s hoping that 2024 will bring us health, happiness and dozens of new, fascinating and rare species of wildlife.

Happy New Year!