Cowslip

The cowslip is a small perennial of the primrose family, native across most of temperate Europe and western Asia, where it favours open fields, meadows, coastal dunes and clifftops. From a rosette of wrinkled, oval leaves it sends up a stem, growing to about 25 centimetres, that carries a nodding cluster of ten to thirty funnel-shaped, honey-scented flowers: deep or lemon yellow, each petal marked with a reddish spot at its base. Its English name may come from the Old English for cow dung, perhaps because it grew among the dung in cow pastures, and its species name means "of spring". In Britain it declined with the farming changes of the 1970s and 1980s and has since recovered, partly because its seed is sown on motorway banks. In English cookery the flowers flavour country wine and vinegar. Norse legend gave the key-shaped flower heads to Freya; in Germany they were thought to open an enchanted castle or a hidden treasure chest, European legend says the red spots mark where elves touched the petals, and faeries were said to brew cowslip wine for their Midsummer Eve revels. Magically it serves healing and love: worn to keep or restore youth, held in a bunch to find hidden treasure, and woven into a tossed ball of flower heads for love divination.