The snake’s head fritillary bears a sinister name for a bloom that is arguably Britain’s most beautiful wildflower. At first glance, the fritillary appears impossibly glamorous — amassed in purple ranks bowing delicately in the breeze. The flower brings a sense of lurid exoticism to the normally sedate meadows of rural England. A closer look at that coyly bowed flowerhead, perched atop a sinuous, snakey stem, reveals an exquisite patchwork of maroon and lilac chequers — this is a plant seemingly more at home clinging to the side of a moss-laden teak in a tropical rainforest.

Stumbling upon a patch of flowering fritillaries in a damp hay meadow is undoubtedly one of spring’s most overlooked and natural wonders. But, for a few short weeks in April and May, fritillary fields are transformed into natural art installations in which meadows appear to have been elaborately decorated with flamboyant clusters of purple cocktail sticks. The fritillary’s sense of the exotic, no doubt enhanced by its habit of occasionally producing pure white bellflowers, as well as double heads, has long bewitched country dwellers. A similar surviving ritual is still held at Ducklington church where, because of the cold weather, the event has been postponed from its regular April date to Sunday, May 5. Fritillaries were once found in almost 30 counties, where they filled flooded hay meadows in their thousands.

Today, the plant is limited to just a tiny handful of sites, mainly flood meadows in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire. As with many of our wildflowers, the fritillary fell victim to our increasingly sophisticated mastery of agriculture.