As spring days lengthen and “smale foweles maken melodye”, like Chaucer’s “sondry folk” I long to go on pilgrimage. So every Easter, following this vernal impulse, I walk up the north-eastern edge of the Chilterns. Here on the sunny slopes of Church Hill, I put my faith in an annual miracle.
Scattered along the chalky escarpment, about 60,000 pasqueflowers (from the Middle English “paschal” meaning “of Easter”) are surfacing and coming into bloom. Felty flower buds nose through the shallow soil, haloed in plumes of white-haired bracts. I can’t resist stopping to stroke them. The undersides of the petal-like sepals that form the buds feel warm and soft, with the irresistible downiness of a newborn’s cheek.
Some of the flowers around me have already unfurled, revealing hosts of golden anthers. Over the next few weeks, the green and white mosaic of grass and chalk will erupt in violet profusion as the short-cropped sward is eclipsed by a multitude of lustrous bell‑flowers. Even the slightest breeze will set the hillside trembling, sixty-thousand nods to the species’ Latin name Pulsatilla vulgaris: the common quiverer.
But despite its specific epithet, the pasqueflower is no longer a common sight on our thin, calcareous soils. Medieval pilgrims may well have encountered slopes of shimmering purple if they walked along chalk or limestone escarpments on their way to Canterbury, but today’s travellers are unlikely to be so lucky. Though we know that pasqueflowers could be found in 130 locations in 1750, the ploughing-up of common lands and changes in grassland management have reduced this number to 18 sites, just five of which contain 99.3% of the country’s remaining plants.
So I make my Easter pilgrimage to Church Hill in the knowledge that this precious place holds over a third of the UK’s pasqueflowers – a plant now classified as “vulnerable” on the Great Britain Red List. I just hope the area’s designation as a local nature reserve and site of special scientific interest means that sundry folk can enjoy Hertfordshire’s county flower here for centuries to come, on one of the few chalk hills where we’re still protecting the living rather than commemorating the dead.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
