The Key to the Fairy World

In folk belief the primrose was a fairy flower and a key to hidden things: to hold the right posy of primroses to a fairy rock or hillside was to open the door to the fairy world and its treasure, and primroses were scattered on the doorstep at Beltane to keep the fairies from doing mischief and to protect the house. It was linked in northern tradition to Freya, the goddess of love. Youth, spring, first love, the fairy realm and a threshold that may open or protect all gather to a small pale flower whose only claim on the world is that it blooms before almost anything else.

Primroses were once picked so heavily for Victorian nosegays and for the Nineteenth of April, Primrose Day, an annual British commemoration of the statesman Benjamin Disraeli whose favourite flower it was said to be, that wild populations declined noticeably around many English towns, and the plant is now protected from uprooting in the wild under British conservation law, a modern legal footnote to a flower once gathered by the basketful without a second thought. Primrose Day, marked each year by the laying of the flower at Disraeli's statue and grave, is one of the few surviving examples of a specific nineteenth-century politician's personal flower becoming a fixed date in the British calendar.