Meadow Crane’s-bill

Meadow Cranesbill, Geranium pratense, is a perennial wildflower of the British countryside and is in bloom from June to August, its scientific name pratense means ‘of the meadow’ but it is often found on roadside verges, embankments and hedgerows too.

Its nectar-rich flowers make it an important and popular plant for many species of pollinating insects, including butterflies, moths, hoverflies and bumblebees. They are usually lilac blue in colour, but paler blues, darker blues, pinks, and even whites can be found, depending on the soil conditions, with Calcareous soils, like the Limestone soils of parts of Northern England, tending to produce a rich blue.

Appearance

The flowers are one of the largest of any native plant to be found in the British countryside, at about 4cm across, and despite being fragile in appearance they are surprisingly robust, each has 5 rounded petals with fine white veins along their length and fade to white towards the centre.

The stamens of the flowers have deep purple anthers which stand out on white filaments, and the central pistil forms a beak like protrusion as it begins to fruit, this resembles a cranes’ bill, which gives the plant its common name and the name of its genus; Geranium, which comes from the Greek noun geranos, meaning Crane. This bill, or beak springs open when mature firing the seeds all around like a blunderbuss, thus helping the plant spread.

Meadow Cranesbill grows in clumps and patches up to a metre tall that are covered in divided leaves and dotted with flowers, the leaves spreading out like a rosette to around 6 cm in diameter and tapered with large teeth, each leaf having 5 to 7 lobes. It is an easily identifiable wildflower and a pleasure to find when out-and-about in the countryside, being a hardy species, tolerant of prolonged periods of cold weather it can also be found long after other species have died back.

Uses

Meadow Cranesbill can been used to treat a wide variety of ailments and diseases, including cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, haemorrhoids, nosebleeds and ulcers, it can also be used to staunch bleeding wounds. Recently agricultural scientists discovered that an extract from the root of the plant has antimicrobial properties and is effective for preventing of potato scab.

The plant, which has many colloquial but now little-used names around the country including ‘Jingling Johnny’, ‘blue basins’, ‘grace of God’ and ‘Loving Andrews’ is heavily rooted in our folklore, being associated with fairies, sprites and other eldritch entities whose attentions can be warded off by wearing one of its blooms as protection, although it is said that plucking one of its flowers may incur a thunderstorm, so it’s maybe best not to!

Morning on the Meadows, by Maureen Fenton

Morning on the meadows

There’s haze on the hills as morning light

lays lines across the sky.

Among the slowly-waking buttercups,

straggle-fleeced sheep stand to graze.

From the second field, warming air now brings

a yeasty smell of drying hay. A curlew cries,

rises; the answering call speeds it on its way.

In the high woods a gamebird crakes. Beneath all

runs the whimpering swish of unseen stream.

By moss-stoned wall, red campion and nettles,

leafy crane’s-bill and tight-furled meadowsweet

compete to reach for sky. By the gate,

cow parsley outgrows them all.

The sun – a silver disc – burns through the veil,

turns the western sky white-tumbled blue,

sets the grass-green, sorrel-russet field aglow

with full-open cups of gold and purple puffs of clover

Then, a graceful ballet across the sky;

five swallows make it summer.

(From the Wildflower Way with Words)

A B-H