The colour of spring for mother

Merry springtime’s harbinger…

THE lines come from Shakespeare’s least known play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, but this weekend mothers the length and breadth of the country will come to know a primrose.

The primrose is said to be the “prima rosa”, the first flower of the year, the little firstling of spring. Its name is not strictly accurate, but its appearance is certainly a harbinger of the end of the freezing conditions in which the chilly snowdrop flourished.

Nowadays, primroses are cheap and eye catchingly vibrant: deep purple, garish pink, lipstick red and lightning yellow. They grow naturally in a posy that demands to be presented on Mother’s Day.

But originally they were more subdued, ranging from pale cream to a natural yellow.

In the 17th Century, a purple primrose from Turkey and a “rhubarb and custard” pink from northern Scotland were mixed with the pale English rose. The riot of colours began.

It’s a process that continues: in Darlington Covered Market they’re selling “primlets”

for the third year. Primlets are grown from an American seed and produce an intense colour in a tight, rose-like flower.

Two great Britons had a real thing about primroses (we’ll sidestep the former Arsenal goalkeeper Bob Primrose Wilson who got his mother’s maiden name as his middle name).

Shakespeare liked the symbolism of the first flower of spring. As well as mentioning them in The Two Noble Kinsmen (his least known play because he wrote, at best, only half of it, and because he used obsolete words like “ver” to mean springtime), he talked of “pale primroses that die unmarried” in The Winter’s Tale – as there are few insects in early spring, many primroses pass over unpollinated.

In Hamlet, he talks of “the primrose path of dalliance”. The primrose path is a slippery slope. It looks to be an attractive way of life, but it leads to unbridled pleasure and ends in self-destruction.

Strangely, Queen Victoria was also on the primrose path. Every year from 1868, she sent her favourite politician, Benjamin Disraeli, a posy of primroses plucked from her gardens at either Windsor Castle or Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Disraeli died on April 19, 1881, and the Queen sent two posies of primroses to be laid on his coffin. She wrote: “His favourite flowers.

From Osborne: a tribute of affectionate regard from Queen Victoria.”

There is no evidence that Disraeli favoured primroses above all other flowers – “a gilded lily” would have been more appropriate, huffed his opponent WE Gladstone – but if the Queen says you do, then you do.

April 19 is still known as Primrose Day when posies are placed on Disraeli’s statue at Westminster Abbey and on his grave in Buckinghamshire, but the Primrose League, which was founded in 1883 to promote his Conservative ideas, folded in 2004.

Nowadays, the primrose has no political prejudice although this year, as it is the multi-coloured herald of spring proper, it could be a reminder that there will be an election before the season’s out.