First Church Meadow slopes down to this southeasterly boundary and so the line of the hedgerow is the dampest part especially directly opposite the pond.One of the "stars" to be found in this part and especially opposite the pond is the Snake's Head Fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris).
These magnificent plants are described in most floras as being "rare" but where they do occur they can be "locally abundant". At Martins' they are only found in this meadow although in a good flowering year their numbers have been recorded in thousands as the survey records show.
They flower in mid April and the name "meleagris" comes from the Latin for guinea fowl which has a chequered patterning on its feathers.
There are a number of interesting things worth noting.
Firstly at Martins' we only seem to get the single purple chequered flower form. At Fox Fritillary Meadow in nearby Framsden there occur white flowered forms (no checkering) as well as plants bearing twin flowers.
For the second point I will just quote directly from Geoffrey Grigson's "The Englishman's Flora"...
..."Fritillaries have a patchy range from Sweden to France and Yugoslavia. They are accepted as English natives, which is geographically possible. Yet the first record of them as wild plants is hardly more than two centuries old.
It was noted in 1736 that they had been growing for more than forty years in Maud fields near Ruislip Common in Middlesex. 'Wild' Fritillaries were first recorded in the Oxford neighbourhood, 'in pascuis humidis prope Oxford', 'in damp meadows near Oxford', as late as 1780, with a more detailed record of 1785 that they grew in Magdalen College Meadow.
Claridge Druce wrote in his Flora of Oxfordshire: 'It is not a little singular that the Fritillary, so conspicuous a plant of the Oxford meadows, should have remained unnoticed by the various botanists who had resided in or visited Oxford'..."..."It seems not only singular, but impossible. The only explanation is that the Fritillaries were not there, that they are not native, that they spread from foreign plants set in the Tudor or Jacobean garden. Here, after all, is a plant of the water meadow, not of the mountain or the cliff, a plant which flourishes under man's nose in a man-made habitat, along with Cuckoo-flower and Cowslip. It could never have been overlooked by Turner, Gerard, Parkinson, Johnson, Ray. It is always worth scrutinizing the neighbourhood of Fritillary fields for evidence of a larger garden at some time in the past..."
It would seem that the occurrence of the Snake's Heads close to the Tudor buildings of Rookery Farm supports Grigson's theory of this plant being an ancient "garden escape" which has colonised the damper parts of the meadow. It might also explain why we do not the different colour and twin form of flowers that occur at Fox Fritillary Meadows - could our plants be of a narrower genetic diversity if the original parents were just a few specimens grown in the Tudor garden?
Other plants that occur in this area include the following...
