Botanical name: Cardamine pratensis 
Folk names: Cuckooflower, milkmaids

Type: Perennial

Wildlife: Caterpillar plant for the orange-tip butterfly which lays one egg per plant on a flower bud. The caterpillars are pale orange then blue-green with a white line down each side and eat the flowers and developing seed pods. They would be a rare but special sighting so worth a try! Also a food plant for the green-veined white butterfly whose caterpillar will eat the leaves. Caterpillars are a vital food source for blue tits feeding their chicks around the same time of year, and for hedgehogs that can access your garden. Flowers are an important spring source of nectar for long-tongued hoverflies, bee flies, early flowering bees and butterflies including the orange-tip.

Flowers: April to May

Decorative merit: Sweetly delicate, very pale pink flowers 1.2-1.8cm across, carried in loose heads. Erect, slender, smoky purple to bright green stems from a basal rosette. In the wild, they can form sheets of mauve in damp grass.

Where: Sun or part-shade. Pond margins, moist patches of grass, moisture-retentive borders, wilder edges where it can form clumps. Goes well with ragged robin for early spring colour.   Plant at least two or three together in a block to be helpful for feeding butterflies.

Folkore: The petals were thought to resemble ladies’ ‘smocks’. When cuckoos were more numerous, lady’s smock flowered at the same time as their arrival. It was believed that picking the flowers led to thunder and lightning.

Cabbage family relative of honesty, sweet rocket and ‘Bowles Mauve’ wallflower.

Donate seeds to Exeter Seed Bank