1. Anemone nemorosa – when doing my Ph. D. on this species my granny told me they used to call it piss-the-bed when she was a child in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.  This would have been early twentieth century [e-mail, October 2017].

2.  Wood anemones – my grandmother called them wooden bettys [Walton le Dale, Lancashire, February 1998].

3. I was born in the 1920s in Farnboro’ village, Kent. As children we played in the meadows which were covered in wildflowers … the wood anemone we called cuckoo flower, because it flowered when the cuckoo arrived in the wood. Sadly we hear the cuckoo no more [Orpington, Kent, February 1998].

Images: main, Tooting Common, London Borough of Wandsworth, April 2014; inset, Woldingham, Surrey, April 2016.