Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes May 6 2009

GRANDMOTHER'S nightcaps were thick on the ground again this spring. These wild flowers are a sure indicator of ancient woodlands so you'll find them in the old hazel and chestnut coppice woods. But only if these centuries-old sylvicultural systems are properly managed by being cut regularly. Otherwise granny's nightcap will vanish.

The picture here shows wood anemones (to give them their more usual name) in the coppice wood a few yards from my back door. They appear as thick as stars in the Milky Way though at night they close up.

I could still see them this spring in the moonlight however. Then they open soon after the sun rises. They shake in the lightest breeze, trembling as though the whole ground is moving.

I suppose that is why they are often called wind flowers. Children have sometimes been confused by the wood anemone name '“ difficult to get right at the best of times unless you remember to say "any money" '“ and have corrupted the name into "wooden enemies".

That turns the marching hordes into toy soldiers. But there's a funny thing: you would think these massed cohorts of flowers would actually march and spread throughout the woodlands but they do not. The colonies hardly move at all.

This colony has not really altered shape in all the 38 years I have lived in this house. They cannot spread because their seed is rarely fertile. Instead they move outwards at the rate of about two metres per hundred years.

So the colonies we see today have taken centuries to make. Such a pity then that this perfect spring flower is so easily destroyed by owners of old coppice woods who simply fail to manage them as part of our botanical heritage.

However, the plant is still common in Sussex and because it needs plenty of sunlight lives comfortably in many of our hedgerows which in themselves are ancient relics of old shaws and woodland edges.

Wood anemones are members of the buttercup family, which has about 1,300 members worldwide.

Sussex has about 35 buttercup family members. The most strange "buttercup" is clematis. More obviously buttercup is the aconite, others include pheasant's eye, water crowfoot, columbine (Aquilegia) and monk's hood.