The Flower of Bristol

I’m sure many people have heard of the Flower of Scotland, but I’m not sure many people apart from Bristol folk have heard of the Flower of Bristol; it is our nearest big city and we have visited it dozens and dozens of times over the years but we didn’t know it had its own particular flower. Burning love, dusky salmon,  Jerusalem cross, Maltese cross, nonesuch… these are all other names for the Flower of Bristol, but it’s Latin name is Lychnis chalcedonica. It came originally from central and eastern Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and north-western China… so how did it get to be the flower associated with the city?

As it’s now winter, there were none of these flowers growing, we’ll have to come back in the summer, but apparently they are between 14 and 39 inches tall with unbranched stems, and they are herbaceous perennials. The flowers are bright red and shaped like a Maltese cross, hence one of its common names.  The reason for its other name, Jerusalem cross, is also to do with the shape of the flowers, and it may have been crusaders who brought the plant back from the Middle east.

The colour of the flower is how it became associated with Bristol because there used to be a red dye produced here in the sixteenth century called Bristow red. Bristow is the old name for Bristol – it is how Shakespeare refers to it; the Bristol dialect adds an ‘l’ to words ending in a vowel, so area becomes areal, Monica becomes Monical, and Bristow became Bristol.