lady's smock or cuckoo flower or mayflower or...

two pictures of the local variants of the cuckoo flower (aka lady's smock etc). As I have described before the normal mayflower is a simple but pretty flower with four petals. these variants are double flowers or hose in hose varieties said by Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica (page150) to be common in parts of Devon.

Below is a picture of marsh marigolds (aka Kingcups, Mayflower, May-blobs, Mollyblobs, Pollyblobs, Horseblob, Water-blobs, water-bubbles, Gollins, the publican (? by whom). Mabey (see above) states that it one of our oldest native plants surviving the glaciations and flourishing after the last retreat of the ice, in a landscape inundated by glacial melt waters. It feels today as if the next ice age is about to start.