Molland Lilly
Many of the remote hedgerows within the parish contain isolated clumps of Lilium pyrenaicum, which is not a native British plant, but one which is native to the Pyrenees Mountains and other mountainous regions at a similar latitude. The plant was discovered by the French botanist Antoine Gouan (d.1821) and was officially recorded in 1875. The clumps appear well-established and were possibly introduced several centuries ago, but are in all cases only found on the tops of hedgerows and not in meadows or waste-land. This suggests deliberate planting by human hand. The plant is thought by some to have been introduced by members of a religious community, possibly connected with Hartland Abbey which held the advowson of the church until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, said to have maintained a park within the parish, now memorialized apparently by a private residence named "Abbot's Park" some distance from the church and a farmhouse near the church called "Abbots". The Molland Lilly has been adopted within the parish as the emblem on the banner of the Mothers' Union and was embroidered in 1998 onto the kneelers at the communion rail in the church. However to assign any established religious symbolism to this yellow variety of lilly might be difficult to justify as the essential symbolic element of the Virgin Mary's White Lilly is its whiteness, denoting purity. Due to the widespread locations of the plant within the parish, beyond the boundaries of such park and unlikely to have spread by natural dispersal of its heavy seeds, it would seem to have been planted at the direction of a person who possessed proprietorial rights over the entire former manor, which suggests direction by a lord of the manor, or possibly by his wife, who wished to beautify the manor. It is thus probable that the original bulb was brought back from the Pyrenees by a former lord of the manor.
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