There is something fascinating about the various colour forms of plants. Primroses, for example, have flowers that are mainly sulphur yellow in colour but they can vary. I have seen them bright pink, dark purple and almost grey. Foxgloves perhaps give one of the greatest variations in colour and in even one large stand of these plants the colour variation can be remarkable. For me the attraction seems to be where flowers are white rather than their normal colours. Each year my almost daily walks with the dogs takes me along a roadside verge near Inverness that is too steep for the farmer to bother with. It has a rich assemblage of wildflowers and, surprisingly, is sometimes dominated by devil’s bit scabious.
The flowers along this bank that, for some unknown reason, I find the most fascinating are the harebells. The majority are their usual blue colour that seems to vary in their intensity from year to year. In some years the blue is very intense while last year it was much paler. Each year I count the number of white flowers and, intriguingly the numbers seems to vary each year. Last year I thought it would be down to a few blossoms on two plants and the result is the photograph with these notes. Then a few days later a surprise as there were four more plants totalling no less than twenty white flowers and still even more in bud. I see other white flowers on these walks such as bluebells, milkworts and forget-me-nots but, for me, it is the white harebells that are the attraction.
There is a difference of opinion over harebells as to whether the ones I see along the bank should be called harebells or wild hyacinth. The Latin name is Campanula rotundifolia and many sources say this wild flower should simply be called the bluebell in Scotland. The source of this confusion is heightened by the fact that even that great champion of the Scottish language Robert Burns was referring to bluebells in his poem “The Song” and not Campanula rotundifolia. The book “Flora Celtica” by William Milliken and Sam Bridgewater, published in 2004, does not exactly help as it states “In Scotland one has to be careful about using the term “bluebell”, for the name can refer both to the wild hyacinth of the woods and the harebell of the meadows”. It really depends on what names you were brought up with which is why I call them harebells. Whatever you call them they are one a few wildflowers to blossom for most of the summer. They will soon be out and yet they will carry on until much later in the year often until the first Autumn gales. Then their paper thin, almost translucent bells that shake on their thin stems will succumb for another year.
Clan Ramsey used the harebell, they call it the bluebell, for their plant badge that would have been worn on the bonnet or elsewhere. The use of plant badges is widely held as a means of identifying Clans in battle or to recognise the bodies at the end but there were many other uses. They were sufficiently important to have been registered at the Court of Lyon in Edinburgh where the lists are still extant. More recently when each county in the UK was asked to choose a “plant emblem” the ones for Antrim in Northern Ireland came down to choice between bog myrtle and harebell and in 2004 the final result was the harebell for Antrim. Local names for harebell in Scotland includes “milk-wort”, “Old Man’s Bell” and “Witch bells”. The Gaelic name is Currac-cuthaige which means “Cuckoo’s-cap”.