Cornflowers and corncockles

'hindereth and annoyeth the reapers' ..'and render the flour specky'

There has been some debate about whether cornflower Centaurea cyanus is native to the British Isles, but for centuries it was a contaminant of imported seed corn.. According to the New Atlas of the British Flora there is archaeological evidence that it has been here since the Iron Age. It has certainly acquired a range of regional common names, usually an indicator of long-term presence: John Gerard in his Herbal of 1633 lists Blew-bottle, Blew-blow, Corn-floure and Hurt-sickle, the latter referring to the way in which the tough stems blunt the edges of sickles and scythes in cornfields.

It has been part of the landscape long enough to acquire numerous regional names. Geoffrey Grigson, in The Englishman's Flora, lists twenty five, including Witch Bells and Witch's Thimble, which were used here in northern England.

It was once as common as poppies in corn fields, until improved methods of seed cleaning and then, in the last decades of the 20th. century, modern herbicides rendered it a rare sight in arable fields. There are now few naturally self-sustaining populations in the wild.

It was always an unpopular plant with farmers. Gerard describes how it 'hindereth and annoyeth the reapers, by dulling and turning the edges of their sickles in reaping the corn'.

George Sinclair, gardener to the Duke of Bedford, writing at the height of the agricultural revolution in the 1840s, describes it as being amongst a class of weeds (which also included corn poppy. mayweed, corn marigold and charlock) that ' with their gaudy colours, like heralds of spring and summer, proclaim bad farming to the landlord, the tenant and the passenger; and announce the neglect of using clean seed-corn, judicious manuring, fallowing, the row culture, and horse-hoe husbandry'.

Today it's mostly grown as a garden flower, usually as the the wild blue form although even in Gerard's day white, pink and double cultivars were also known in gardens. It makes a very attractive cut flower.

The best display I’ve ever seen was one established by the Woodland Trust at Low Burnhall farm near Durham city about fifteen years ago, a temporary sowing while the arable land was being replanted with native trees.

For a year or two the display of cornflower, corncockle, corn marigold, corn poppy and mayweed was simply stunning, a nostalgic reminder of the appearance of cornfields in the landscape before the advent of modern farming techniques. It would have had George Sinclair spinning in his grave.

These days corncockle Agrostemma githago is an essential component of many commercial annual wild flower mixes thanks to its inherent beauty, but perhaps also because it has become a symbol of a time before agricultural intensification and the advent of modern herbicides wiped out so many cornfield weeds: corncockle is now extinct in the wild. But, back in the days when horses and hard manual labour were the essential tools for farming these pretty flowers, imported in contaminated seed corn, were an unwelcome sight in a wheat field. Corncockle is a prolific seed producer and if the seeds were milled they contaminated the flour. Here, again, is advice from George Sinclair F.L.S., F.H.S., Gardener to the Duke of Bedford, writing in The Weeds of Agriculture published in the 1840s:

'The miller's objection to these seeds is, that their black husks break so fine as to pass the boulters, and render the flour specky; also, because the seed is bulky, if there be much in the sample, it detracts considerably from the produce in flour: whatsoever is not wheat, must lower the value of that which should be all wheat.

It is the duty and interest of farmers to meet their customers the millers with clean samples; for the latter never forget to make use of every objection to beat down the price. "I would give you the other shilling if it were not for the cockle", is a common conclusion to one of these bargains: so a farmer having a hundred quarters of wheat grown in one field, loses five pounds by sowing a little cockle.'

In Sinclair's day the only solution for a farmer with cockle seed in his harvest was to resort to laborious sieving. ' A cockle sieve is therefore necessary, and will be found, for other purposes, very useful in a barn’, he advised. No doubt he would be appalled that anyone should deliberately sow this plant.