Moon cycle:
- New Moon: 29th March 2025
- Full Moon: 13th April 2025
- New Moon: 27th April 2025
Pink Moon / Egg Moon
April’s full moon is known in North America as ‘Pink Moon’ after an early blooming pink wildflower native to parts of the continent – the ‘Creeping phlox’ or ‘Moss phlox’ (Phlox subulate). An appropriate name for this month in the UK might be after one of many UK wildflowers that to bloom at this time – ‘Bluebell Moon’?
Other traditional names for the April full moon include ‘Sprouting Grass Moon’, ‘Egg Moon’, and ‘Fish Moon’. So what might be an appropriate name for this time of year in the UK?
Ēostre’s Moon
The Venerable Bede in his 8th-century text De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time) describes the Anglo-Saxon names of each month. April was named Ēosturmōnaþ, the month of Ēostre. (Listen to Ēostre pronunciation here.)
Ēostre was a pagan spring goddess of the Germanic peoples, including Anglo-Saxon England. She presided over new growth, wildflowers, crops and animals. She was specifically associated with the hare and with eggs, both symbols of fertility (it was previously thought that hares laid eggs, as they shared habitat with ground nesting birds!) These associations have long been appropriated into the Christian festive of ‘Easter’ (derived from Ēostre) and with chocolate eggs and Easter ‘bunnies’.
Ēostre’s Moon provides an opportunity to focus on spring flowering. Sadly, plants are often the poor relatives in our contemplation of nature. Some educationists have described the lack of focus on vegetation as ‘plant blindness’ or ‘Plant Awareness Disparity’ (PAD), and this includes loss of nature words. What you cannot name, you cannot really know, love or nurture. Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ book ‘The Lost Words’ has done much to bring this loss to people’s attention. The book followed an outcry after removal of many nature words from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (aimed at seven-year-olds). Many of the lost words are directly linked to April flowering – ‘Bluebell’, ‘Buttercup’, ‘Cowslip’, ‘Dandelion’.
Noticing plants
Wildflowers are not hard to ‘see’ you just have to bring them into focus, not simply to regard vegetation as ‘backdrop’ to the active life of people and other animals.
Plants and their flowers have a very long relationship with people, from the practical as food and medicine, to a wide range of folk associations. As we have become more detached from the natural world, these uses and understandings fade. Who today makes dandelion wine or daisy-chains?
Folk names and traditions can make the story of plants more meaningful to young children. Richard Mabey has done much to bring plants back to our attention, through his wonderful ‘Flora Britannica’, an encyclopaedic guide to British plants, their names and folklore. Developing a narrative around plants invests them with meaning.
Many plants that begin to flower under Ēostre’s Moon provide opportunities to explore a range of questions. How do non-native species affect native vegetation? What counts as a native in the UK? What is a ‘weed’? Why do some flowers vary in colour? What do their names tell us? Here just three plants are explored in a little detail.
The ‘bluebell’ (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), ‘wood bells’, ‘fairy flowers’, are the quintessential flower of spring, carpeting the woodland floor. It is an example of a species well-beloved but under threat from an ‘invasive species’, the Spanish bluebell (E. hispanicus), a garden escapee. The latter is more robust and competitive than the native and less delicate in colour. As well as displacing our bluebell it hybridises with it, diluting the native’s classic shape.
The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) by contrast is generally regarded as a ‘weed’. What constitutes a ‘weed’ is a good starting point for discussion. Dandelions, like ivy, are a ‘marmite’ plant, some people love them, and others hate them. Both are very important sources of nectar and pollen. Dandelions bloom in early spring and are a key nectar source for bees and butterflies when other flowers have yet to bloom. Ivy flowers late in the year after plants have stopped. The dandelion’s name – ‘dent-de-lion’ (French) – is derived from the jagged tooth-like shape leaves, which are commonly eaten as a salad item.
One of the most magical of Ēostre’s flowers is our arum lily ‘lords and Ladies’ (Arum maculatum). Found in woodland, but also in parks, churchyards, hedgerows and verges the arum is dramatic. It consists of broad, glossy, arrow-shaped leaves, and when in flower it is immediately distinguishable by its ‘spathe’, a large pale-green cowl-like structure which surrounds the plant’s tiny flowers. The flowers, which sit at the base of the spathe, are topped by a conspicuous rod-like ‘spadix’, which can vary from deep purple to buttery yellow in colour. The spadix becomes warm at certain times and this together with the colour lures tiny flies to its flowers.
Variation in leaf and flower makes this an interesting plant to study. The leaves come in a spotted and un-spotted form, which appears to vary geographically, with fewer spotted plants westward and northward in the UK, but may vary locally, for example under dense cover and in more open places. Similarly, the wide variation in the spadix from dark purple via dull reds to buttery yellow could be explored. It does have its downside however, as all parts of the plant can cause an allergic reaction, (the berries are the most poisonous part). All fieldwork with plants should, however, be very carefully planned and warnings given as necessary.
The arum, widely known as ‘lords-and-Ladies’ or ‘cuckoo pint’ (pint to rhyme with mint), has well over a hundred folk-names recorded across Britain, including one of the longest – ‘Kitty-come-down-the-lane-jump-up-and-kiss-me’ (Kent). ‘Cuckoo pint’ is derived from ‘pintle’ (or penis) and is just one of several ribald folk-names associated with the spadix, including ‘dog’s dibble’, ‘priest’s pintle’ and ‘willy-lily’.
What’s happening where you are?
At this time of year many more flowers starting to bloom. This will also mean that you start to see many more insects, like bees and butterflies that are attracted to these flowers to harvest nectar and pollen. Keep a log of when local plants come into bloom. Climate change is causing UK plants to flower almost a month earlier on average, according to the Woodland Trust. What’s happening where you live? Your class can help track change by submitting data to Nature’s Calendar.
Share your stories!
What stories do your children have about flowers, do they still make daisy chains, or check if people like butter by holding a buttercup under their chin? Do they use folk-names for flowers? Get them to ask their parents and grandparents about folk-names and traditions. We invite you to share your suggested Moon names and explain how this reflects nature events where you live. Please tag us in your stories or pictures using the hashtag #EnvironmentalLunacy.
Related activity ideas
What wildflowers can children name? Which have they seen any on their journey to school and around the school grounds? Create a class fact file and map. This can be revised as the season change.
Lots of flowers have animal names or body parts, ask students to name some or imagine how these have come about using photographs to provide clues; ‘Foxglove’, ‘Bee-orchid’, ‘Bladderwort’, ‘Navelwort’, ‘Chickweed’, ‘Harebell’, ‘Horsetail’ etc. Some names are obscure – see note on Dandelion above!
Even if your school is in a town of city there are plenty of opportunities to study wildflowers. In fact, some of the more interesting sites are ‘ruderal habitats’, waste ground, walls and paving, as well as edges of arable fields. These habitats give children a chance to evaluate what ‘life-form’ a plant needs to survive – for example plantains, daisies etc. found on heavily trodden playing fields, have rosettes of tough leaves flat to the ground. Other plants protect themselves with thorns and other devices (e.g. stinging-nettles).
Notice and record different flower colours you can find in your local area. Draw the flowers and colour with crayons or take photos. What are the most common flower colours? Which species show most variation in colour? Worth noting that bees and other pollinators do not see what we see. Many flowers have ‘nectar guides’, directional lines to help bees to find nectar that are only visible in ultraviolet! Photos taken using ultraviolet sensitive cameras are available on-line – search ‘nectar guides ultraviolet’.
General activity ideas
Children are expected learn to use a variety of approaches to answer scientific questions; enquiry should include observing over time; pattern seeking; identifying, classifying and grouping. Wildflowers provide an excellent resource for field-based enquiry. Plants are static but change through time (flowering, seed setting, etc.), and species composition can vary in only a short distance (e.g. ground flora in the open and under heavy shade).
‘The variety of living things in a given place’. Using quadrats (typically one square metre) have children count the number of different plant species rooted within it. A better measure, but more difficult, is to count the number of individuals of each species. A quadrat with 14 species in it may appear more diverse on that simple measure than one with only 10, but one species might dominate the first quadrat in terms of numbers of individuals, and in time may dominate entirely. Children can also compare their findings of diversity along a transect from wet to dry, or open to shady (does deep shade suppress ground flora?)
Resources and useful websites
- There are many good wildflower guides on the market but try to use a guide with illustrations rather than photographs. One of the best guides to wildflowers is Fitter, R., Fitter, A., and Blamey, M. (1978) Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe, Collins. It has a simple but effective pictorial key, and the illustrations are excellent, and copies can be obtained cheaply on-line and in charity shops (photo guides are much less easy to use).
- The Field Studies Council publish excellent fold out guides that focus on wildflowers in specific habitats.
- A range of ID apps exist that allow you to photograph a flower for identification. While helpful to confirm identification it is still better to use a guidebook as the starting point.
- Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland – the BSBI map site provides an introduction to plant identification and distribution maps for individual species of plant.
- There are various sites to help schools develop wildflower plots on the grounds, e.g. Eden Project – ‘Wildflowers in Schools’.
References
- Mabey, R. (1996) Flora Britannica, Chatto & Windus.
- Mabey, R. (2012) Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants, Profile Books.
- Macfarlane, R and Morris, J. (2017) The Lost Words, UK Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House.
Authored by Peter Vujakovic, Emeritus Professor of Geography at Canterbury Christ Church University