I was so pleased to find a small patch of snake’s head fritillaries growing in our garden.

I’ve long loved these flowers.  The texture of the petals really does look like snakeskin, but I also love the shape. Most shapes in nature are circles and curves, but these flowers are almost square, with sharp corners. 

Apparently one of the old names for this plant was ‘leper Lily’ because the flowers resembled the bells carried by lepers. 

I read that although these lovely flowers once grew abundantly by the Thames and  in meadows in parts of Wiltshire, where we live, they are now rare in the wild, and are now only found in a handful of meadows in the UK.

To see lots of them growing wild, the place to go apparently is Sweden.