The Secret Life of a Meadow by Wilson Wall;David Morgan; & David Morgan

Author:Wilson Wall;David Morgan; & David Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NATURE / Ecology
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2023-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.1. Long shadows of early morning across a frosted meadow.

The stunning snake’s-head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) is the first plant to flower in spring in the small meadow (Figure 5.2) and while the number in flower can fluctuate dramatically from year to year, the timing is always pretty consistent: early April just before the cowslips.

Timing is critical for pollination as all of the plants must flower around the same time if they are going to be able to exchange pollen. Fritillaries, like other early spring bulbs, such as bluebells and daffodils, depend on making the most of the warmth and sunlight of late spring before the meadow’s summer perennials grow up and take their light. Their strategy is to power very rapid early spring growth and flowering from the reserves they stored away at the end of the previous season, after which they need to lie dormant through the summer, ready in the late winter for the big push. The evidence suggests that temperature is the major factor controlling dormancy. Higher soil temperature and lower soil moisture forces the bulbs into dormancy in early summer and a period of lower soil temperature is needed to break dormancy. Commercial growers keep bulbs at 5°C for thirteen to seventeen weeks to do this and thus ensure predictable and uniform flowering of pot-grown fritillaries for sale. In nature the bulbs start growing in the autumn, the shoot slowly grows up towards the soil surface, reaching it sometime early in the winter. Here it stays until, probably triggered by both temperature and day length, it starts fast above-ground shoot growth in mid-late February.

The fluctuation in the number of fritillaries that flower every year is largely explained by their rather tortuous life history. Adults do not flower until their bulb is big enough, at which point the bulb is completely consumed to produce the plant. So every year the plant must grow a new bulb, together with seed, if it has flowered. Also, bulbs can split off bulblets from their bases. Bulb, seed and bulblet all make claims on the reserves the plant builds up while it is growing. If the season is poor or last year’s bulb was only big enough for a small plant, the new bulb might not be big enough to allow the plant to flower. In nature it takes many years to go from seedling to flowering plant and survival, particularly in the early years, can be poor. In the year when the seed germinates, the plant is no more than a single, small, filamentous seed-leaf about the same size as a cat’s whisker. There follows years as a juvenile, with just a single true leaf, a sub-adult, with two or three leaves, a vegetative adult, with four to eight leaves, before finally the bulb is big enough, at 12–20mm, to produce a flowering plant, also with four to eight leaves. This whole cycle can take as much as eight years. If you plant fritillaries as seeds in your meadow, you need plenty of patience.

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