Little Purple Flower

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by monster

Those may be what your family calls forget-me-not, SG, but they're not. Forget-me-nots have five petals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forget-me-not.

It's not so much my family; the 'rents both grew up in London or its environs.
It's mostly a combination of schoolfriends, nature walks and I-Spy Wildflowers. Please tell me you know the I-Spy series? In the first case it was a knee-jerk "remembering" that was completely wrong. In this case it is honestly what we called them, but I am happy to hold my hands up and say we were wrong. They were blue ground cover that "we" called forget-me-nots and I'm happy to be corrected. I mean no slur on the I-Spy series.

Originally Posted by monster

Those are little wild flowers my mum would've called Vetch

I've heard vetch before - I'd accommodated that definition!

Your new contenders either are real forget-me-nots, or my inital thought- a plant I remember , but not sure I ever knew the name. They get a lot of cuckoo spit on them - a bubbly fluid made by insects who like that plant to protect their nests

The spikey ones have no cuckoo spit on them. I know cuckoo spit intimately, because The Field outside our house (now Bates Court) ran wild, as did we. I "knew" all the plants and insects and saplings, even if my knowledge didn't stretch to accurate naming. But am happy to accept them as forget-me-nots given the evidence; the blue haze over the school field (which was a mile long in my memory) was NOT forget-me-not. But it was prevalent, and seems to be nearly 40 years later. Good on it.