Appearance
The oxlip is a herbaceous or semi-evergreen perennial plant growing to 30 cm tall by 25 cm broad, with a rosette of leaves 5–15 cm long and 2–6 cm broad. It produces light yellow flowers in spring, in clusters of 10-30 together on a single stem 10–30 cm tall, each flower 9–15 mm broad.It may be confused with the closely related "Primula veris", which has a similar general appearance, although "P. veris" has smaller, bell-shaped, bright yellow flowers, and a corolla tube without folds. The leaves of "P. veris" are more spade-shaped than "P. elatior".
The flower heads on the oxlip all hang in the one general direction, which distinguishes it from the similar False Oxlip, a Primrose/Cowslip natural hybrid, where the blooms are distributed all around the stem.
Naming
The specific epithet "elatior" means "taller". The common name "oxlip", from "ox" and "slip", may refer to the fact that oxlips are often found in boggy pasture used by cattle.References:
Some text fragments are auto parsed from Wikipedia.
