As I write I have a small canvas bag of yellow-rattle seed on my desk. It bulges now like a full purse and the disk-like flattened seeds jangle a little like cash when shuggled about. In fact, if I bought it commercially, it would be the equivalent of £30, which is not bad for two hours’ work.
I find it intriguing to discover how a suite of old names once did link yellow-rattle to manmade coin. In Somerset Rhinanthus minor was known simply as “money” and in Leicestershire as “money-grass”. I love most, however, a wry Lanarkshire coinage: “gowk’s sixpences” – “cuckoo’s sixpences”. It was probably intended to suggest the idea of fool’s gold, but for me it carries a different set of associations.
If not wealth for cuckoos, the flowers are indisputable riches for bumblebees. Behind each single seed, imagine the following transaction, repeated hundreds of thousands of times throughout May and June: the insects wandering the flowers relentlessly, pressing down their long tongues into the nectaries, extracting sweetness to grow new bumblebees and, in exchange, dusting the plant stigmas with a few pollen grains from previous blooms. The pollen then germinates and extends a tube down into the plant’s ovary where the ovum is fertilised. A month later and we get all that rattling new wealth.
The mutually beneficial relationship between angiosperms and insects dates back to the Cretaceous. So the yellow-rattle makes another incidental payout to me in the process: letting me glimpse a fragment of the world once owned by dinosaurs. Yet the plant’s immeasurable donation to this country as a whole was its fundamental place in four million acres of flower-rich meadow.
These knee-high forests of insects and colour, flowers and scented hay, were once a glorious centrepiece of the English countryside. Alas, in the rush for real cash, we lost almost all of them during the last century. Just 1% survives. My bag of seed is a small private act of restitution, because, when sown later this autumn, it will expand my embryonic meadow towards its one-acre goal. I know it’s not much. Yet it makes a big difference on that one acre.
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