Life in Newburgh on Ythan

By Talpa

The snakes are out!

The snake's head fritillary Fritillaria meleagris is very near the top of my list of our most beautiful native flowers.
However, Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, exuberant aristocrat and co-creator of the glorious gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, was of a quite different mind calling it "a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay."

In her 1926 poem, The Land  she had this to say:
.....
"And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls
Camping among the furze, staining the waste
With foreign colour, sulky-dark and quaint,
Dangerous too, as a girl might sidle up,
An Egyptian girl, with an ancient snaring spell,
Throwing a net, soft round the limbs and heart,
Captivity soft and abhorrent, a close-meshed net,
—See the square web on the murrey flesh of the flower—
Holding her captive close with her bare brown arms.
Close to her little breast beneath the silk,
A gipsy Judith, witch of a ragged tent,
And I shrank from the English field of fritillaries
Before it should be too late, before I forgot
The cherry white in the woods, and the curdled clouds,
And the lapwings crying free above the plough."

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