Like most gardeners I have my successes and failures. I had chalked up my attempt to establish Snake's Head Fritillary as a failure. This is a species which is extremely rare in the wild where it requires a very specific habitat: a free draining soil which floods in winter. 

 Some years ago I planted fifty bulbs of Fritillaria meleagris and they amounted to nothing. A back garden in South London clearly failed to approximate their natural habitat- or so I thought. Today I noticed a couple have survived and seem to be doing alright. So I'll persist and buy another ten or twenty in the autumn to see if more will grow in the same spot.

 By way of a contrast tens of thousands grow in the water meadows of Magdalen College, Oxford [see entry dated 17th. April 2017]. Surely one of the greatest sights in all England...