The Sunday of Going Back
It is the first week of March and Simon Lycett is in a van on the A40 in Oxfordshire, which is not where he expected to be at six in the morning, but the farm he is visiting does not receive visitors at any other time because the person who runs it is in the field by five-thirty regardless of the season. The farm grows daffodils — native British daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, the Lent lily of English hedgerows, in varieties that are neither the stiff commercial stems that arrive from Lincolnshire’s flat bulb fields nor the Colombian imports that occupy the supermarket buckets — and Lycett, who has been one of Britain’s most prominent florists for thirty years and who has spent the past decade making an increasingly specific argument about where flowers should come from and why, has been sourcing from this farm for the Mothering Sunday season for several years. The drive is part of the argument.
Lycett’s argument, in brief, is that the flowers of Mothering Sunday have been flattened — compressed into the same register of commercial sentiment that has gradually absorbed Mother’s Day in its American form, with the consequence that the occasion has lost something it once had: a specific texture, a particular set of plants grown in the particular conditions of a British March, carrying particular meanings derived from a tradition that predates the American holiday by several centuries and has a different character entirely.
Mothering Sunday and Mother’s Day are not, despite the conflation that now governs most British retail, the same occasion. Mother’s Day — Anna Jarvis’s creation, established in the United States in 1914 — is a secular holiday of gratitude addressed to individual mothers. Mothering Sunday is an older English Christian observance, falling on the fourth Sunday of Lent, which was historically a day of return — of homecoming to the mother church, the cathedral or principal church of one’s diocese, and by extension to the family home, for domestic servants and apprentices who were typically released for the day. The flowers brought home on Mothering Sunday were not purchased from a florist. They were gathered from the hedgerows and fields passed on the walk back from service — violets, primroses, the first wild daffodils — and presented not as a retail transaction but as evidence of the journey, as flowers that could only have been gathered by someone who had actually walked that particular road on that particular day.
The retail industry has understandably preferred the American model. It is more straightforward to merchandise. But the older tradition — gathered flowers, the walk home, the mother church, the fourth Sunday of Lent — is not gone, and there are florists, growers, and a small but growing body of people who find the distinction worth maintaining.
We traced seven flowers that belong, specifically and historically, to Mothering Sunday rather than to its American imitation.
01 — The Wild Daffodil
Narcissus pseudonarcissus — the Wye Valley / the Forest of Dean / Grasmere, Cumbria
The wild daffodil is not the daffodil of the supermarket. This distinction, which sounds merely botanical, is in practice a distinction of almost every quality that matters: size, form, colour, fragrance, and the character of the thing itself.
The commercial daffodil — typically a large-flowered cultivar developed for stem length, colour intensity, and the ability to survive refrigerated transit from a Lincolnshire field to a London distribution centre without damage — is a flower of engineering. It is reliable, uniform, and produces at scale. The wild daffodil, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, is smaller, paler, and grows with a delicacy that the cultivated varieties have traded away in their optimisation for commercial purposes. Its petals are a cool, almost lemon yellow; its trumpet, a slightly deeper primrose, is short and irregular in the way that wild things tend to be irregular, without the stiffness of the bred varieties. Its fragrance — faint but present, most perceptible in a warm room on a cold morning — is nothing like the heavy sweetness of the Oriental lily or the forthright scent of a hyacinth. It is a hedge-bottom, early-March fragrance: green and delicate, carrying the specific temperature of the season in which it blooms.
The relationship between this flower and Mothering Sunday is straightforwardly geographic. The wild daffodil flowers in March, precisely at the Mothering Sunday period, in the hedgerows and woodland clearings of the counties through which domestic servants and apprentices would have walked on their annual day of return. The flowers they picked were not chosen from a range: these were the flowers that were available, growing in the verges and the edges of managed woodland, and to bring them home was to bring the specific landscape of the walk, condensed into a bunch of small pale flowers that would last three or four days in water before fading.
The principal concentrations of wild daffodil in England are in the Wye Valley — the Leadon Valley around Dymock in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire produces what is known as the Dymock daffodil, an annual spectacle of wild narcissus that draws visitors in late February and early March — and in the Lake District, where the flowers immortalised by Wordsworth in 1804 (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’) still grow around Ullswater and in the Grasmere meadows. Both populations are protected; commercial picking from wild stocks is not permitted. The wild daffodils sold by specialist growers like those Lycett visits in Oxfordshire are grown from bulbs of the true species rather than harvested from wild populations, and the distinction between a cultivated pseudonarcissus and the wild-collected version is detectable only to those with very specific prior experience of both.
In Wales, where the daffodil has been a national symbol since at least the 16th century — worn on Saint David’s Day on the 1st of March, the week before Mothering Sunday in many years — the wild daffodil has a cultural significance that the cultivated varieties do not carry. The folk name cenhinen Bedr — Peter’s leek — appears again here, and the proximity of Saint David’s Day to Mothering Sunday in the March calendar gives the flower a double significance in Welsh domestic life that the English tradition does not quite replicate.
02 — The Primrose
Primula vulgaris — West Cornwall / Devon / the Kentish weald
The primrose was, before the commercial cut-flower market rationalised Mothering Sunday into a rose-and-carnation occasion, the archetypal flower of the day. It blooms in March — sometimes February in the milder counties, sometimes not until April in the colder ones — in the hedgebanks, woodland clearings, and south-facing slopes that domestic servants and apprentices would have passed on their walk home. Like the wild daffodil, it is not a flower of cultivation but of landscape: present in the places through which people move rather than in the places people design.
The primrose’s symbolic vocabulary in the English tradition is extensive and old. In the language of flowers, it signifies young love — but the quality of young love specific to the primrose is not the ardent, declaring kind; it is the tentative, observant kind, the kind that is still looking rather than already certain. This quality of attention, of careful noticing before commitment, has made the primrose a flower associated with the beginnings of things: the beginning of spring, the beginning of feeling, the beginning of the year’s warmth. On Mothering Sunday, arriving home with a bunch of primroses gathered from the bank above the lane was to bring this quality of beginning with you — to mark the day as one that was itself a beginning, the season turning, the family gathering around the fire one more time.
Benjamin Disraeli — who, as Prime Minister, sent Queen Victoria primroses every year on the anniversary of his mentor’s death, giving rise to the Primrose League founded in his memory — described the flower in his letters with an affection that was notably personal rather than sentimental. He found in the primrose something specific to the English spring that he could not identify in any other flower, a quality of presence he attributed to its timing and its habit of growing close to the ground, at eye level for someone willing to stoop: not presenting itself to be admired from a distance, but available to those who paid attention.
The commercial cultivation of primroses for the Mothering Sunday cut-flower market is modest compared to the daffodil trade — the primrose is more naturally a pot plant for this occasion, its compact habit and abundance of bloom translating well to a small clay pot, which is closer in spirit to the original domestic transaction than a bouquet of cut stems. Several growers in West Cornwall, where the mild climate allows outdoor flowering from February, produce cut primroses for the specialist florist market, and these are among the most sought-after Mothering Sunday flowers among the buyers who know to ask for them. The Cornish primrose crop is variable by year — a cold February delays it, a warm one may bring it before there is market demand — and the growers who produce it are, uniformly, growers of small scale and particular conviction, rather than the large commercial operations that produce the daffodil and tulip crops.
03 — The Violet
Viola odorata — the Wiltshire Downs / Dorset / Toulouse, France
The violet has appeared already in this series of guides, in the Valentine’s Day piece, where its history ran from Athens to Napoleon’s locket and arrived, via Toulouse and Parma, at the argument that it is the most under-used romantic flower in the contemporary market. Its Mothering Sunday credentials are older and distinct: not romantic but devotional, not personal but communal, rooted in the specific practice of gathering wild violets from the banks and verges on the walk to and from the mother church.
The timing is precise. The sweet violet, Viola odorata, flowers from late February through April in the hedgebanks of southern and central England — earlier in the sheltered valleys of Dorset and Wiltshire, later on the heavier soils of the midland counties. On the fourth Sunday of Lent, which falls in late March in most years, the violets are reliably in bloom across most of the southern half of England, and the pale purple flowers, not always visible until you are close enough to smell them, were among the most easily gathered of the Mothering Sunday wildflowers. The fragrance — which disappears on first inhalation and returns a moment later, a quality caused by the ionone compounds that temporarily fatigue the smell receptors — was associated in popular tradition with something specifically present, specifically alive, worth finding.
In the Christian symbolic tradition that overlaid the secular custom, the violet’s humility — its low growth, its half-concealed flowers, its preference for the shade rather than the open sun — was read as a virtue appropriate to the Lenten season. The fourth Sunday of Lent is the one moment of relaxation in the Lenten discipline — known as Laetare Sunday, from the Latin word for rejoice, the day when the purple of Lent is briefly replaced in some churches with rose-coloured vestments and the strict observance is relaxed. Violets, with their own transitional colour between purple and pink, sit between the two. They are not the joyful flowers of Easter; they are not the penitential colour of Lent proper. They are the colour of Laetare Sunday: almost there.
The gathering of violets for Mothering Sunday was, in many parts of England, specifically a children’s activity. Parents did not pick violets for Mothering Sunday; children picked violets for their mothers. The transaction was understood as an act of return — of giving back something from the landscape that had formed the family’s daily life, gathered by the children who ran ahead of the adults on the path home, pressing small bunches into larger hands at the door. The adult who has no memory of having done this cannot fully appreciate what is lost when the activity is replaced by a visit to a petrol station.
04 — The Simnel Cake Flower
Narcissus — a note on the cake and what it carries
The simnel cake is not a flower. It is a fruitcake — marzipan-topped, with eleven marzipan balls on the surface representing the eleven faithful apostles (Judas excluded), baked for Mothering Sunday in the English tradition since at least the medieval period and associated with the day as specifically as hot cross buns are associated with Good Friday.
It appears in this guide because the simnel cake was, historically, the object carried home on Mothering Sunday more often than flowers. Domestic servants, permitted to return to their family homes for the day, baked the cake in the kitchen of the household where they worked — using the household’s ingredients, with the tacit permission of the employer — and carried it home as the primary gift for the occasion. The flowers were gathered on the walk. The cake was the substance.
The marzipan of the simnel cake traditionally incorporated rosewater — the distilled water of rose petals, used for centuries in English confectionery and baking as a flavouring derived from the Rosa damascena, the Damask rose cultivated primarily in Bulgaria’s Rose Valley, in the region around Kazanlak, and in the Isparta province of Turkey. The rosewater connects the simnel cake to the flower tradition, however obliquely, and the rose petal that sits atop some decorated versions of the cake is not purely ornamental but a reminder of the ingredient within.
The Rose Valley of Bulgaria — the Rozova Dolina, a fifty-kilometre stretch of the Balkan foothills between Kazanlak and Karlovo — produces the majority of the world’s rose oil, harvested from Rosa damascena in the brief three to five week flowering window of May. The connection between a Bulgarian rose field in May and a Mothering Sunday cake baked in an English country house kitchen in March is, temporally and geographically, quite remote. It is also, in the specific way of food history, entirely direct: the rosewater that flavoured the marzipan was a product of the same regional specialisation that continues to produce, in the same valley, by the same method of steam distillation, the rose oil that perfumers still purchase at prices that reflect both the brevity of the harvest window and the volume of petals required — approximately three to five tonnes of rose flowers to produce one kilogram of oil.
05 — The Tulip
Tulipa — the Lincolnshire Fens / the Bollenstreek, Netherlands
The tulip has appeared in three previous guides in this series — Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day — carrying a different set of associations in each. For Mothering Sunday, the tulip’s relevant qualities are none of the ones emphasised elsewhere: not the Ottoman martyrdom poetry, not the Passion iconography, not the cheerful directness of the Mother’s Day gift. The relevant quality is timing.
The British tulip harvest — centred in Lincolnshire, whose flat fenland fields produce bulbs and cut stems in commercial quantities — reaches its peak in late April, which is slightly late for Mothering Sunday in most years. But the Dutch crop, available through the Aalsmeer market from late February onwards, and the increasing production of forced British tulips in polythene tunnel systems that bring the season forward by several weeks, has made the tulip reliably available for the late March Mothering Sunday window. And its availability in late winter and early spring, when the choice of British-grown flowers is otherwise very limited, has given it a practical importance to the Mothering Sunday market that its history does not quite explain.
What the tulip provides for Mothering Sunday specifically is colour at a season when colour is scarce. The English March is still predominantly a grey and brown landscape, the trees still bare, the hedgerows still last year’s dead growth, the fields still last year’s stubble or the sharp green of winter wheat. Into this landscape, a bunch of tulips — saturated in their pinks and reds and yellows and purples, each one a closed vertical form that will open gradually over the days following purchase — brings a quality of promise. Not the promise of flowers already open and already past their peak, but the promise of flowers still becoming.
The florists who handle tulips well for Mothering Sunday — and this is a distinction worth making, because handling tulips badly produces the bent-neck collapse that is the flower’s commercial failure mode — understand that the stems must be cut on a diagonal, wrapped tightly to keep them upright until they have drunk, and given cool water rather than warm. A tulip purchased at its correct stage of development and correctly handled at home will open over four to five days, the stem straightening rather than bending, the bloom growing rather than shrinking. It is a flower that improves with attention, which seems appropriate for the occasion.
06 — The Forsythia
Forsythia × intermedia — the Midlands / the Home Counties / Sussex
The forsythia has appeared in this series once before, in the Easter guide, where its relevance was theological: the bloom on bare branches as an illustration of grace, unexpected and unearned. For Mothering Sunday, the theology is less central than the timing and the gesture. Forsythia blooms in March, on bare branches, in gardens and on roadsides across most of Britain, and the practice of cutting branches for indoor arrangement — bringing what is happening in the garden into the house, as evidence of the season turning — is one of the oldest forms of domestic flower use in the English tradition.
A cut forsythia branch placed in water in a warm room will continue to develop its flowers, the buds opening over several days, so that a branch cut when barely a few flowers have opened will, within a week, be fully blazing. This quality of continuing to bloom after cutting, of arriving partly closed and opening in the house, gives forsythia a different character from cut flowers that are already fully open when purchased: it is a gift that develops. It requires nothing of the recipient beyond a vase and a warm room, but it gives more than it first appears to offer. For a day about recognising what has been consistently provided over years — care that was present and working even when it was not visible — this quality of gradual revelation seems appropriate.
The forsythia’s specific association with Mothering Sunday, as distinct from Easter and Christmas, is a matter of geography rather than symbolism. In the regions of England where Mothering Sunday flower-gathering was most actively practised — the rural counties of the Midlands, the Home Counties, and the Southeast — forsythia was among the most reliable garden and roadside sources of colour in March. It could be cut from the family garden, from a neighbour’s hedge, from the branches overhanging a lane, and carried home in a way that wild-gathered primroses and violets could not be, in the quantity required to fill a vase rather than form a posy. The forsythia bunch on the Mothering Sunday table was not the flowers of the hedgerow: it was the flowers of the garden, gathered from the cultivated landscape of home itself.
07 — The Lenten Rose
Helleborus orientalis — the Cotswolds / East Sussex / specialist nurseries
The Lenten rose is the seasonal plant most specifically calibrated to the liturgical moment of Mothering Sunday, and the one that the contemporary retail market has most consistently failed to make available in the form that the occasion requires. It is not a cutting flower in any commercial sense — its stems are short, its blooms face downward in the characteristic attitude of a plant that has been compared, in this series, to modesty and, in the botanical literature, simply to the mechanics of the flower’s structure — and its unavailability as a cut stem has effectively excluded it from the mainstream Mothering Sunday market. This is, arguably, a loss worth noting.
Helleborus orientalis — the Lenten rose, the Oriental hellebore, distinct from the Christmas rose Helleborus niger encountered in the Christmas guide — flowers from February through April in precisely the range of colours that the season requires: dusty rose and pale pink, deep plum and near-black, spotted and mottled and plain, always slightly mysterious in a way that the garden designers who have championed the genus over the past thirty years have described as the quality of a flower that is thinking. The blooms nod. They do not face you directly. To see them properly you must crouch, or lift the stem, or lie on the ground, which is the position from which the hellebore is properly appreciated and which few people are willing to adopt in a March garden.
The name derives from Lent — the flower appears in Lent, persists through Lent, and in the Christian tradition of the medieval garden was associated with the penitential season in a way that its demeanour, its downward gaze, its colours on the purple side of the spectrum, seemed to confirm. It is not a celebration flower. It is a reflection flower, a flower of the kind of love that is not about declaration but about presence — the love that is simply there, not announcing itself, doing what it does because that is what it does, in the season that requires it.
The appropriate way to give a Lenten rose for Mothering Sunday is as a pot plant rather than a cut stem — a small plant, in flower, that can be placed in the garden after the occasion and that will, given reasonably adequate conditions, return every year. In this, it differs from every other flower in this guide: it is the only Mothering Sunday flower that can be given once and received annually thereafter. A Lenten rose planted in the garden on Mothering Sunday 2026 will, in a well-maintained garden, still be flowering on Mothering Sunday 2046, and perhaps considerably beyond. As long-term expressions of the occasion’s meaning go, this one is not subtle. But it is precise.
Coda
Simon Lycett, back from the Oxfordshire farm with his van of wild daffodils, is making the argument again — as he makes it every year at this time — to buyers who arrive at his studio with preconceptions formed by supermarket flower sections and thirty years of Mother’s Day marketing that has, in the British context, substantially overwritten the older tradition. He does not make the argument badly. He makes it by showing people flowers: this is what a wild daffodil looks like, and this is what the commercial variety looks like, and here is the difference, and now decide which one you want to give.
The decision most people make, once they have been shown the difference, is in favour of the smaller, paler, slightly irregular thing rather than the uniform commercial stem. This is, in Lycett’s view, not merely an aesthetic preference but a recovery of something that was present in the original custom and has been mislaid in the translation to modern retail. The original flowers of Mothering Sunday were gathered, not purchased. They were available because the season produced them, not because a supply chain had been engineered to produce them in any season. They were imperfect, variable, and specific to a particular walk on a particular March Sunday, and they carried that specificity as part of their meaning.
The retail market cannot provide this. It can provide good approximations of the spirit — wild daffodils from a specialist grower, primroses from a Cornish farm, violets from a grower who has kept the Wiltshire stock going because someone thought it mattered — and these are worth seeking out. But the argument that Mothering Sunday is not, at its core, a retail occasion cannot be fully made through retail. It requires, at minimum, the willingness to walk the road home with attention, and to notice what is growing in the verge.
The notices are still there. The primroses are still on the bank. The wild daffodils are still in the Dymock wood, the same flowers that domestic servants gathered in the 18th century to bring home to the same kitchens, in the same counties, in the same weeks. The season has not changed. What has changed is the attention paid to it, and that — unlike the flowers — is something that can be recovered without a supply chain.
Andrsn Flowers recommends
Dymock Daffodil Weekend, Gloucestershire/Herefordshire — held annually in late February and early March, the weekend includes guided walks through the Dymock woods at the height of the wild daffodil season, with local guides who know the specific locations of the densest concentrations. Accommodation in the area is limited; book through the Dymock village website. dymock.co.uk
Simon Lycett Studio, London — Lycett’s studio in south London sources Mothering Sunday flowers primarily from British growers, including wild daffodil specialists, Cornish primrose growers, and seasonal foliage from managed woodland. Orders for Mothering Sunday must be placed at least two weeks in advance. simonlycett.co.uk
The Real Flower Company, Hampshire — carries British-grown Mothering Sunday arrangements including wild daffodils, primroses, and seasonal foliage; the Mothering Sunday range is distinct from the Mother’s Day range and available to order from late February. realflowers.co.uk
La Violette Toulousaine, Toulouse, France — for those who want the full violet experience: the cooperative ships fresh Toulouse violets to UK addresses during February and March, arriving packed in cool boxes within 48 hours of cutting. violettetoulouse.fr