In a meadow near the centre of Oxford grows the fabulous and rare snake’s head fritillary, one of Britain’s most exquisite wild flowers. It is now in bloom and looks like a Tiffany lampshade, with translucent chequered purple or white bells that hang down from a stalk. And the likeness to Tiffany stained glass may be no coincidence, because the flower influenced art nouveau designers – William Morris used the fritillary in some of his fabrics, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh made a painting of it in 1915.
As for its name, when you look into the flower the teeth of the petals point menacingly towards you and the stamens inside are forked like a snake’s tongue. Or as Vita Sackville-West described it: “Sullen and foreign looking, the snaky flower” (The Land, 1927).
To see fritillary flowers growing in their thousands all nodding their heads in the breeze is breathtaking, but a rare sight. The ancient wet meadows that fritillaries grow in have been largely ploughed and sprayed into oblivion. And collecting the plants finished off many other locations - a hundred years ago the fritillary was abundant but ripped up in vast amounts each spring to be sold as cut flowers in markets. It now thrives in only a handful of locations in England – the site in Oxford at Iffley Meadows was down to a few hundred plants by 1983, but management by the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust has restored the numbers to about 90,000 plants, even more astonishing when it has survived so close to a city.
