Where have all the flowers gone?

My favourite fact of the week is to have discovered that in the UK there are 2,500 species of eyebright, 2,500 different varieties of that dainty, slender-stemmed flower, with its bright white trumpet. It’s so small and yet always stands out, demanding to be noticed. You can tell it’s a plant that’s determined to survive no matter how much we might try to stamp it out.

At this time of year you can see them, tiny but dazzling dots of white, on grassy roundabouts and roadside verges and in your own lawn, if you’re lucky. Open Country this week (Radio 4, Saturdays and Thursdays, beautifully produced by Helen Chetwynd) took us up to the North Pennines, to the few remaining hay meadows where eyebrights flourish, those fields of green dotted with ‘shards of tiny-coloured pigments’, like a medieval manuscript, white eyebrights competing with daisies and deep purple clover, brilliant yellow buttercups and lilac selfheal.