This carving, in Portland stone, by Bernard Johnson, celebrates the word ‘Cowslip’, and was created as part of our exhibition ‘The Lost Words - Forget-me-not.’ For this exhibition artists have created a permanent record of the natural words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Size: 44 x 33cm

NOUN: COWSLIP

A European primula with clusters of drooping fragrant yellow flowers in spring, growing on dry grassy banks and in pasture.

Primula veris, family Primulaceae

ORIGIN: Old English cūslyppe, from cū ‘cow’ + slipa, slyppe ‘slime’, i.e. cow slobber or dung

When I was invited to contribute to this exhibition I was intrigued, not least because forty years ago as a young marketing manager at OUP I worked on the first edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. I was fascinated that the deletion of vocabulary describing the natural world had caused such a stir, and been the inspiration for a new and beautifully illustrated book. Critics have decried the loss of some pastoral words – but we must be comforted by the thought that they will not entirely disappear: certainly not those memorialized here. 

I have chosen to carve COWSLIP. In his 1633 Herbal, Gerard wrote of the cowslip’s medicinal properties, and commended them ‘against the paine of the joints called the Gout’. More poetically, a fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream tells Puck: ‘in their gold coats spots you see/Those be rubies, fairy favours…/I must go seek some dewdrops here/And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’ As long as people read Shakespeare, the name of the cowslip will endure.