Why Cover a Spring in Flower Petals? A Custom Nobody Can Date

A wooden frame is filled with clay that has been puddled with water and salt until it is smooth and sticky, and that clay is then scratched with the outline of a design. The picture is built entirely from natural material pressed into the clay, working from the bottom upwards so that each row overlaps the one below and sheds water. Flower petals supply the colours, laid one at a time and overlapped like tiles. Seeds, bark, moss, lichen, cones, berries and eggshell supply texture, outlines and detail. The whole panel is completed within a few days, since the material begins to fade immediately, and it is raised beside the well for about a week before being dismantled.

Every part of the picture uses something growing:

• •Petals for large areas of colour, chosen for how long each kind lasts
• •Dark seeds and bark for outlines and lettering
• •Moss for green areas and for backgrounds
• •Alder cones and berries for texture and shading
• •Eggshell and rice for white
• •Nothing artificial, which is enforced by the competition rules where they exist

The origin is genuinely uncertain and the explanations offered should be treated with caution. The custom is sometimes attributed to thanksgiving for water surviving a drought in the fourteenth century, sometimes to gratitude for a village escaping the plague in 1665, and sometimes to a pre-Christian practice of honouring water sources that was absorbed rather than suppressed. None of these is documented contemporaneously, and the first firm records of the practice date from the eighteenth century. The pre-Christian explanation in particular is the sort of claim that was attached to a great many British customs by nineteenth century writers with an interest in finding pagan survivals, and it is generally unsupported.

Marking and honouring water sources is very widespread and the English example sits within it. Holy wells across Britain and Ireland number in the thousands, attached to saints, visited for particular ailments and frequently marked with rags tied to a nearby tree, which is a practice recorded across Europe and central Asia. Coins dropped into water for luck is the same impulse in a domestic form and is old enough to appear in Roman deposits. Springs feature in the founding stories of a great many settlements. Continental European processions bless water sources annually. What these share is that a reliable spring was genuinely vital, and the customs mark something that mattered before anybody had a tap.

The custom is confined largely to one part of England and has grown rather than declined, which is unusual among traditional practices and has identifiable reasons. It requires a substantial group working together for several days, which makes it a community project rather than a performance, and villages compete with each other in a way that sustains effort. It attracts visitors in numbers that matter to local businesses, which supplies a practical reason to continue. It is visually spectacular and photographs extremely well, which has spread it. New villages have adopted it in recent decades, and the number of participating places has increased. The designs are frequently religious and increasingly include secular subjects marking local events.

Clay in a frame is scratched with a design and covered entirely in petals, seeds, moss, bark and eggshell, worked from the bottom up so each row sheds water, and the panel lasts about a week. The origin is genuinely unknown, with drought, plague and pre-Christian explanations all lacking contemporary documentation. The custom has grown rather than declined because it is a community project that attracts visitors.