Great Burnet – The Crimson Witness to Summer’s End

30 Aug

**Official name:** *Sanguisorba officinalis*

**Habitat:** Damp meadows, pastures, and riverbanks. In the UK, it is often found in traditionally managed hay meadows, especially where the soil is heavy and rich.

Great Burnet is a striking plant, rising above the summer meadow with its deep crimson flower heads held on long, delicate stems. Its rounded flowers appear almost weightless, swaying in the breeze, yet they command attention with their unusual colour and form.

I don’t often paint red plants — the palette of meadows for me is usually whites, golds, and every shade of green, interspersed with the soft mauves and pinks of orchids and knapweed and scabious.

Red in nature is rarely casual. It arrives with intensity — the flush of berries before winter, the blaze of leaves before they fall, the brief flare of petals that mark a season’s height or end. It is a colour of culmination, of ripeness tipping into decline, of beauty that carries with it an inevitability. In the meadow, the red of Great Burnet felt bound to time itself — impossible not to see, impossible not to recognise as both presence and passing. On an July visit to Clattinger Farm, Great Burnet was everywhere, and impossible to ignore.

This visit was also at a moment of transition: the meadow was alive with flowers, but at the same time it was being cut for seed harvest. That combination — abundance and ending side by side — made the Great Burnet seem even more significant. The deep red flower heads became witnesses and markers of time, both fleeting and enduring.

As I painted a few weeks later , I found myself thinking again about how these meadows hold time differently. The cutting is necessary, part of the cycle that sustains the richness of the flora year after year. Yet in the moment, there’s always a pang… the sudden loss of colour, the stillness after the movement of the meadow is gone.

In my paintings of Great Burnet, I tried to hold that duality: the richness of the colour and form in the present, and the awareness that it was also the end of that season’s flowering. The plant became for me a symbol of time’s passing — of presence and transience in the same breath.

Folklore and Traditional Uses

Great Burnet has a long history in herbal medicine. Its Latin name, *Sanguisorba*, literally means “blood absorber,” a reference to its long-standing use as a remedy to staunch wounds and control bleeding. Both the leaves and roots were used in traditional remedies, and in some parts of Europe it was brewed as a tea for digestive ailments.

The common name “burnet” is thought to come from the French *brunette*, meaning dark brown or red — a nod to the plant’s distinctive flower heads. In folklore, it has been associated with vitality and endurance, fitting for a plant that flowers so late in the meadow year and brings such intensity of colour.

I’ll be painting more moments inspired by this encounter, when Great Burnet stood most prominently against the turning of the season. Join my mailing list below to always know about the latest work, blog posts and exhibitions.

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