A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, the Blackthorn has been out for ages here in East Finchley and feels like a true herald of spring, but in Nature’s Calendar, Lulah Ellender describes how the plant has a much darker side: the permission of the fairies had to be asked before any part of Blackthorn was cut or harvested, and it was said to be imbued with evil spirits and prone to cause miscarriage. On the other hand, it was the material of choice for Irish shillelagh – the wood was daubed with butter or buried in manure in order to cure it, and was then placed inside a chimney. Just the thing to give someone a bash on the bonce!

The wood is also the material used for the staff of the ceremonial Black Rod in parliament, who has the door of the House of Commons slammed in their face on Queen’s/King’s Speech day, and is only allowed admittance after striking the door with the staff three times.

Now, let’s have a look at some more personal remembrances of Blackthorn, from 2016…

Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) on Hampstead Heath on Saturday

Dear Readers, what a pleasure it is to see the blackthorn in full flower. The English name of the plant describes it well for anyone uncertain what it looks like – the twigs and branches are black or dark grey, and the plant has thorny side shoots. Each of the flowers has many long, elegant stamens which give the blossom a speckled appearance. Such a mass of flowers is a boon for early insects of all kinds, from hoverflies to honeybees. In some traditions, the signal for the start of Imbolc, the time of Celtic  spring rituals, was the blooming of the blackthorn.

I must confess to a personal attachment to this plant. In its other incarnation as the sloe, blackthorn forms the basis of one of my favourite tipples, sloe gin. My father worked for many years as a distiller for Gordon’s Gin. In those days, the recipe for the gin was a closely guarded secret (the details were held in a locked safe), and only a few people knew how to make up the concentrated flavour that would be used to create the spirit. As a result my father, who left school at fourteen, ended up flying all over the world, working in distilleries in Spain, Jamaica, and in the middle of a jungle in Venezuela. He had many adventures, including being confined to quarters during a State of Emergency in Jamaica, being knocked over by an earthquake in Venezuela, and flying first class with Peter Wyngarde, the diminutive mahogany-toned star of the TV show Jason King. I credit my dad with imbuing me with a love of travel, and the belief that it was possible to  have an interesting and fulfilling life regardless of where you start.

Peter Wyngarde (Photo One – credit below)

And what has all this to do with blackthorn, I hear you plead? Well, Gordons made a limited number of bottles of sloe gin, which, heavily diluted with lemonade, was one of my first introductions to the delights of alcohol. I still love a glass at Christmas today (though minus the lemonade). It is possible to make the drink at home, though the process involves gathering basketfuls of the astringent purple-blue fruits, and individually pricking every one to allow the juices to colour and flavour the gin that you pour all over them. At Gordon’s, they had a special machine for pricking the sloes, which I believe were harvested in Scotland. And a very fine drink it was too.

The juice from the berries has also been used as a dye – apparently it initially turns cloth a reddish colour, but after several washings this turns to a permanent pale blue.

Sloes! (Photo Two – see photo credits below)

Humans are not the only creatures with a taste for blackthorn, however. It is a recommended source of food for the caterpillars of the rare Black and Brown Hairstreak butterflies, as well as numerous moths.

Black hairstreak (Satyrium pruni) (Photo Three – credit below)

Brown hairstreak (Thecla betulae) (Photo Four – see credit below)

The eggs of the brown hairstreak are laid directly onto the stems of the blackthorn, and it’s well worth having a look to see if you can see any next time you are passing by a bush. They are quite distinctive, though at a distance you might mistake them for lichen, or bird droppings. Once the caterpillars emerge, they are extremely well camouflaged and feed only at night.

Egg of the butterfly Thecla betulae on a Prunus spinosa twig (Photo Five – credit below)

And for your delectation, here are some of the other insects whose larvae may be found feeding on blackthorn:

The small emperor moth (Saturnia pavonia) (Photo Six – see credit below)

Brimstone moth (Ophithograptis luteolata) (Photo Seven – see credit below)

The Concealer Moth (Dasycera oliviella) whose caterpillar, unusually, eats dead blackthorn wood (Photo Eight – see credit below)

As so many creatures depend upon it, it is a good thing that blackthorn has been used as a cattle-proof hedge since at least medieval times. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey describes how crossing the blackthorn with the cultivated plum tree can produce ‘thorns more than two inches long and tough enough to penetrate a tractor tyre’, so I can well see how even the most ambitious cow would admit defeat.

The wood is described by Cobbett as being ‘precisely the colour of the Horse Chestnut fruit and, as smooth and bright, needs no polish’. Blackthorn wood has been used as a material for walking sticks, and was traditionally the wood used for Irish shillelaghs (clubs), because it was less prone to cracking than other materials. The wood was seasoned with lard and put up a chimney to season, which gave it its black colour. The normal weight of the stick was about two pounds, but a ‘seasoned club’ had the hitting end filled with molten lead. You would not want to attempt to mug someone carrying one of these sticks, for sure.

Some very fine shillelagh (Photo Nine – credit below)

Although it was a rather mild day when I spotted the blackthorn in blossom at the weekend, it is said that the plant may come into flower during a period of bitter winds following a ‘false spring’ – a ‘blackthorn winter’. As with many plants that bear berries, plentiful fruit was also believed to be indicative of a harsh winter to come:

‘many sloes, many cold toes’

The bark has been used as an intestinal tonic, and also for tanning – it turns leather a reddish-brown colour. It seems that this plant, which shares such a long history with us, has been useful to us at every turn.

I like to try to find some artistic or poetic reference to my Wednesday Weed, and this week I have found this portrait by the Pre-Raphaelite Marie Spartali Stillman, arguably the greatest woman artist of the movement. The painting shows the Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni, a character from Dante’s poetry, and she is described as ‘a heartless lady dressed in green’. She is holding a branch of blackthorn, and I wonder what it symbolises: her wintery coldness, her thorny nature, or even her purity? Her enigmatic gaze is giving nothing away. I love that the painting features not only the blackthorn, but that the flowers in the Madonna’s hair are hellebores, and that ivy twines amongst the dried oak leaves above her head.

Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni by Marie Spartali Stillman(1884). Currently in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Photo Ten – credit below)

Spartali Stillman lived in England for her whole life, first in Clapham and then on the Isle of Wight. She studied under Ford Madox Brown (who is buried in ‘my’ cemetery) and was a model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron and Burne-Jones, amongst others. She also had an extensive sixty year career of her own, which included major exhibitions in both the UK and the US. Yet I had never heard of her. It seems that, as so often, a woman’s work is buried in obscurity while her male compatriots are famous names. I am  fortunate to live in an age where such works can be discovered with a simple internet search, uncovering a whole world of beauty that I can share here. It is easy to criticise the web, and yet it enables us to make connections that I cannot imagine would have been so easily made any other way. Who knew that a post on blackthorn would take me so far?

Credits

Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’ and Sue Eland’s ‘Plant Lives‘ website are my constant companions for the Wednesday Weed.

Photo One – By Allan warren – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9982286

Photo Two – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=337699

Photo Three – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.

Photo Four – By Hectonichus – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12471724

Photo Five – By Gilles San Martin – Flickr: Thecla betulae egg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15753504

Photo Six – By jean-pierre Hamon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=524340

Photo Seven – By ©entomart, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=294708

Photo Eight – By Donald Hobern – originally posted to Flickr as Esperia oliviella, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5715537

Photo Nine – By Samuraiantiqueworld – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12311379

Photo Ten – By Marie Spartali Stillman – Source 2nd upload: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/484137028666579864/Source 1st upload: http://bertc.com/subone/g94/stillman.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=607536

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

Dear Readers, last year I planted lots of wildflower seeds, in the hope that something interesting would pop up, and this year seems to be the year of Red Campion – there are half a dozen plants, all looking very pink, and attracting the attention of rather a lot of aphids. Let’s hope that the aphid munchers won’t be far behind!

To be honest, I’m amazed that anything  is thriving at the moment – the shed is down, and the slab for the next one is laid, but the remains of everything else (including the eight-foot bamboo that was supposedly ‘contained’ in a trench behind the shed, but which was in fact breaking out in all directions) is strewn about the garden, waiting for a skip. Hey ho. At least my neighbours have plenty of bamboo canes for their allotments.

And now, let’s have a look at my original post about Red Campion, from 2016. Where did those ten years go, I wonder?

Red Campion (Silene dioica)

Dear Readers, there is a ‘wild’  burial site in the cemetery, close to where I feed the foxes. I love this as an idea – I can think of no nicer place to be interred,. One area has been roped off, and it’s full of ox-eye daisies, grasses, speedwell and the pink flowers of red campion. However, it’s not plain sailing all the way, and it’s clear that there’s more work to be done on some of the other parts of area. Here, for example, are some of the docks. Many of them are so enormous that they actually look down on me, like triffids who are just waiting to pull their roots up before they take over the world.

This is the problem for anyone who tries to set up a wildlife meadow. In ‘real life’, these would be mowed regularly, to gather in the hay and to prevent the perennials (like the docks and sow thistles and bindweed) from setting seed. If this is neglected, within a year or two what you have is not a meadow, but scrub, and all the biodiversity disappears. On the other hand, I did see this very splendid red dock weevil, but I think he will need lots of little friends to cope with the sheer volume of dock leaves.

Anyhow, back to the red campion. This is a native plant, and a member of the Caryophyllaceae, the same family that includes chickweeds, stitchworts and pinks. The petals are very deeply notched, and the flowers always look to me like gears from a child’s model engine.

The Latin species name ‘dioica’ indicates that, as with annual mercury, the male and female plants are separate. The male flowers have ten stamen (though some might be buried within the capsule of the plant at any given time), and the female plants have 5 style (which look like little white hooks). The seed capsule has ten strongly down-curved teeth on the edge. I am currently doing the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s Identiplant course, for which I had to find ten plants and record how many were male and how many female. In my little sample, there were nine males and one female, which makes me wonder a little about whether there is something in the seed mixes used for ‘meadows’ which favours one sex over another, though I have no idea why this should be.

The genus name, Silene, comes from the Greek god Silenus, who was always drunk, and is often depicted swaying atop a long-suffering donkey. Now, the name Silenus is said to come from the Greek word for saliva, implying that Silenus was not only drunk, but drooling. What a delightful picture! However, the link with the Red Campion is that the female flower is said to produce a foam which helps to capture pollen from visiting insects. I have not seen a bloom doing this, but will keep an eye open and see if I can capture such behaviour on camera if I notice it.

Just to complicate matters, red campion contains a substance called saponin, which has been used in soap-making – indeed another member of the family, Soapwort, has historically been used for just this purpose. Maybe this is another reason for the ‘Silene’ Latin genus name.

‘Drunken Silenus Supported by Satyrs’ – Anthony van Dyck. Public Domain.

Red campion has a variety of alternative names, but one that I like is ‘Bachelor’s Buttons’, referring to the way that the plant was worn as a buttonhole by eligible males. However, it was also said to be one of the flowers that children should not pick, as it was associated with the death of parents – on the Plant Lore website, one person reports that the plant was known to them as ‘mother-and-father-die’. On the Isle of Man, red campion is said to be beloved by the fairies, and so it shouldn’t be picked by humans. The plant is also said to be efficacious in the unlikely event (in the UK at any rate) of being threatened by a scorpion: all you have to do it grab a handy red campion and hurl it at the offending arachnid and he or she will scuttle away. Never let it be said that you don’t learn useful things in the Wednesday Weed.

Medicinally, the flowers of red campion have been taken in a glass of wine as a treatment for kidney and liver complaints and internal bleeding. The crushed seeds are also said to be efficacious against snakebite, but on the Plant Lore website mentioned above, one lady, from Wales, said that her grandmother was convinced that a snake would come into the house if she brought a posy of the flowers, so it appears that you can’t win.

You might expect that such a bright-faced spring flower would attract the attention of poets, and you would not be wrong. Mary Howitt (1799 – 1888) was the author of ‘The Spider and the Fly’ (parodied by Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland’ as ‘The Lobster Quadrille). She was a most prolific writer, creating over 180 books, and wrote many poems for children. Among them was ‘Summer Woods’ (you can read the whole poem here, and a fine evocation of the joys of the great outdoors it is too).

There are many things to love about Mary Howitt, who had a most full and adventurous life, including relocating to Scandinavia (where she learned Swedish and Danish and proceeded to translate Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales), being friends with the Wordsworths and Charles Dickens,  and meeting the Pope. She was never separated from her husband William, and The Times had this to say about them:

‘Their friends used jokingly to call them William and Mary, and to maintain that they had been crowned together like their royal prototypes. Nothing that either of them wrote will live, but they were so industrious, so disinterested, so amiable, so devoted to the work of spreading good and innocent literature, that their names ought not to disappear unmourned.’

When I read about the lives of Victorians, I am amazed by the fullness of their lives, and the variety of things that they got up to. However, it would be a mistake to think of them as  exceptional. Every person, if listened to in a sympathetic way and asked the right questions, seems to have had an extraordinary life. We rarely think of our lives as in any way unusual, but if we stop to consider the experiences that we’ve had, the people that we’ve met and loved and influenced, the place that we have in our community and in our family, we might be surprised at the richness and complexity of our existence, the extent of our interconnectedness. In a world that seems to view other living things, including human beings, as expendable, it’s worth remembering how precious every single one of us is.