I’ve just been watching the first butterfly of spring, a lovely yellow brimstone gliding across a sheltered spot in the garden.  These are the floatiest of butterflies, like a large leaf pirouetting in a breeze, and their rich buttery hue seems to accentuate their spring freshness. It’s even been suggested that their colour gave ‘butterflies’ their name. Anyway, the sight made me start wondering about possible connections between spring and the colour yellow.  We think of spring as the season of greening, but maybe spring makes some of its most important announcements in yellow.  After all, a lot of our early spring flowers are yellow, too.  The year starts with aconites, gleaming like little golden lanterns through the winter’s undergrowth.  We then pretty soon have a succession of primroses, celandines, daffodils, dandelions, coltsfoot and cowslips – all different shades of yellow.  Why would that be?  One theory is that their bright yellow colour attracts the early pollinators like bees, so these plants get a head start in the work of fertilisation.  Nice idea – simple, striking and plausible.  It’s the sort of pop scientific knowledge we all like to parade.  But hang on, does the logic work?  Aren’t there a lot of early flowers that are not yellow – snowdrops, many crocuses, scilla, wood anemone, and so on?  And equally, there are lots of yellow flowers that come later – sunflowers, chrysanthemum, corn marigold, tansy, ragwort, mullein and a whole tribe of humble vetches, trefoils, stonecrops and saxifrages.  Moreover, gorse displays at least some of its sweet-smelling yellow flowers all the year round – hence the wise saying that when the gorse flowers kissing is in fashion.  And anyway, don’t most insects have quite different perceptions of colour from ours, relying much more on the ultra-violet band in the wavelength, so they wouldn’t necessarily see the yellows we see?   

Collapse of hypothesis?  Not entirely, but it demonstrates that these things are quite complicated.  Another thought might be that several of these early yellow flowers like the celandine and buttercup are also very shiny, so maybe they are more reflective of such sunlight as there is early in the year and therefore more attractive to insects for that reason?  By contrast, some of the later flowering plants like ragwort have a much duller, matt finish. 

Could there be an unlikely clue to the puzzle from taxi-cab design? It’s said that when John Hertz founded his Yellow Cab Company in Chicago in 1907 he chose that colour because it made his taxis easier to spot at a distance and his customers found it attractive.  And now yellow cabs are everywhere in the world.  Nature knows best.

Jeremy Mynott
March 2025

We visited the Thomas Gainsborough House in Sudbury the other day. As well as the gallery it has a lovely old garden, once an orchard, with three fruiting trees of great character: a quince, a medlar and, best of all, a magnificent black mulberry whose mighty limbs have been bent down under the weight of years and now rest their elbows on the ground around the main trunk. This mulberry is over 400 years old, so would already have been well established in the 1730s when the future artist Thomas Gainsborough played in the garden as a child. It was one of many thousands imported into Britain by James the First in 1607 to try and establish a silk industry in this country to match that in China.  

As everyone knows, silk comes from the silk moth whose caterpillars (silkworms) feed on mulberry leaves and then spin a wondrous cocoon of silken thread to surround the pupa before it finally metamorphoses into the adult moth, Bombyx mori.  This raw silk has such special properties of lustre and softness that it became highly prized as a luxury fabric.  Hence the ancient craft of sericulture – silk manufacture from domesticated silkworms – that had been practised in China for several thousand years but whose techniques remained a closely guarded secret until, the story goes, Christian monks smuggled some silkworms out of China in a hollow stick around AD550 and presented them to the Roman Emperor Justinian in Constantinople.  An early intellectual property theft!  The ‘Silk Roads’ from China later became a major trade route to the West, exporting huge quantities of silk and other natural products.  No wonder King James wanted some of the action. But he made one big mistake.  The trees he imported were all black mulberries (Morus nigra), but any naturalist could have told him that silkworms only feed on the white mulberry (Morus alba), a quite different species, native to China.  Well, at least the black ones produced nice jam.

As it happens, Sudbury did later become – and still is – a major centre for silk production in England, though all the silk has to be imported.  The black mulberry itself entered English culture in a quite different way, through the nursery rhyme ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ in which children are encouraged to get themselves up, washed, dressed and ready for school ‘on a cold and frosty morning’.  The lyrics have dubious origins, but maybe here too there’s a mistake a naturalist could have picked up.  Could the composer actually have meant a ‘blackberry bush’?  Both brambles and mulberries have juicy black fruit, but mulberries only grow on trees not bushes. Hmm.

Jeremy Mynott
5 November 2024

Autumn is the most ambiguous season.  You know where you are with winter’s bare and chilly landscapes, spring bright with blossom and bird song, and summer’s rich abundance.  Autumn seems a more in-between season, harder to define exactly, but it has its own subtler qualities.  Think of the slanting light on the fields, the wistful autumn song of the robin, swallows lingering on the wires before departure and the rusty hues of the falling leaves.  If you’re feeling at all elegiac, autumn looks back with nostalgia and forward with apprehension.  November in particular is no one’s favourite month, as Thomas Hood described in what must be the gloomiest poem in the English language:

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds –
November

He should have got out more, though.  Far enough, at any rate, to look at an ivy-covered wall on a sunny autumn day, as I’ve just been doing.  It was literally humming with insect life, all attracted by the nectar and pollen in the ivy’s late flowerings.  There were red admiral butterflies, sucking up the reserves of energy they’ll need for hibernation, some honey bees and a small cloud of busy hoverflies – which included the eponymous ‘ivy hoverflies’ and, judging from their vivid orange and black banding, also a few of the delightfully named ‘marmalade hoverflies’. Ivy provisions a multitude of bird species through the winter, too – blackbirds, dunnocks and thrushes, which rely on its nutritious black berries when other food sources have been exhausted.  It provides cover for tiny spiders, for the overwintering eggs and pupae of many moths and butterflies, and a safe retreat for small mammals and for nesting robins and wrens.  So, it’s at once a larder, a fortress and a home to a host of wildlife. 

No wonder, then, that ivy has entered human culture, too, as a symbol of evergreen life.  The ancient Greeks and Romans crowned the winners of poetry and athletic conquests with wreaths of ivy.  They also regarded it as an antidote to drunkenness, perhaps because their grape-vines would often become smothered by ivy.  Bacchus, the Roman god of intoxication, was usually depicted wearing a wreath of ivy and that connection continued in the medieval custom of having an ivy-topped pole outside ale houses.  Ivy featured in traditional health cures and it also became a symbol of the elite Ivy League of US universities, which planted ivy to commemorate each new term.  And finally, ivy and holly are a central part of our Christmas rituals, with the entwined ivy representing the female principle that binds everything together.

Jeremy Mynott
3 October 2024