Primrose

The primrose, Primula vulgaris, is a low woodland perennial of pale yellow flowers that open very early in the year; its name means first rose, from the Latin prima rosa, for its place at the front of the spring, though it is no rose at all. As one of the earliest and gentlest flowers of the returning year it became an emblem of youth, of new beginnings and of tender first love, and it carried too, from its brief early season, a note of youthful death cut short, the primrose path of Shakespeare leading pleasantly but to no good end.

Primrose flowers were also gathered for the kitchen and still-room in old England, made into a delicate primrose wine and crystallised as a sugared garnish for cakes and puddings, culinary uses recorded in seventeenth-century English receipt books alongside the plant's more famous ornamental and medicinal reputation. Its close relative the cowslip, Primula veris, shared much of the same folk regard as a herb of the nerves, and the two Primula species were often used and gathered somewhat interchangeably by country herbalists, though as with most such traditional nervine remedies, no rigorous modern clinical evidence supports the practice, and it is recorded here strictly as folk history.

In folk belief the primrose was a fairy flower and a key to hidden things: to hold the right posy of primroses to a fairy rock or hillside was to open the door to the fairy world and its treasure, and primroses were scattered on the doorstep at Beltane to keep the fairies from doing mischief and to protect the house. It was linked in northern tradition to Freya, the goddess of love. Youth, spring, first love, the fairy realm and a threshold that may open or protect all gather to a small pale flower whose only claim on the world is that it blooms before almost anything else.

Primroses were once picked so heavily for Victorian nosegays and for the Nineteenth of April, Primrose Day, an annual British commemoration of the statesman Benjamin Disraeli whose favourite flower it was said to be, that wild populations declined noticeably around many English towns, and the plant is now protected from uprooting in the wild under British conservation law, a modern legal footnote to a flower once gathered by the basketful without a second thought. Primrose Day, marked each year by the laying of the flower at Disraeli's statue and grave, is one of the few surviving examples of a specific nineteenth-century politician's personal flower becoming a fixed date in the British calendar.