Dear Readers, when I was growing up in East London we had an allotment. I was allowed a little corner of it to plant a packet of ‘seeds for children’ – from memory, you could buy these in Woolworths, and they contained a mixture of marigolds, a strange plant that looked a bit like (and indeed might actually have been) knotgrass, and love-in-a-mist. How I loved the blue and white flowers and the dill-like leaves against the bright orange marigolds! And how my poor father loved picking out the love-in-a-mist from between the peas and the beans and the cabbages the following year after the plant had self-seeded.

This set me to wondering. Do they still have ‘seeds for children’? And do they still include love-in-a-mist? Well, Suttons certainly do. Indeed you can buy nigella seeds and they’re marketed as ‘Alien eggs’. Well, I can kind of see what they mean.

But what is this plant? Turns out that it’s a member of the Ranunculaceae or buttercup family, and normally lives in southern Europe, north Africa and southwestern Asia. It is pretty much a weed of damp places in all these countries. But what a weed! Those china-blue flowers (which can also be coloured white or pink), the frond-like leaves and that strange bloated seedhead all give it an exotic charm. The seedhead is a behemoth compared to those of other members of the buttercup family – those of other species more closely resemble a tiny mace. Plus, as mentioned, it is ridiculously easy to grow – I found the specimen in my photos in a most inauspicious narrow bed at the side of a house in East Finchley, where it was popping up amongst the docks.

The species name ‘damascena’ refers to the city of Damascus, which is where it is said to have been found during the Crusades by the French knight Robert de Brie in 1570. On his return home to his castle in Champagne, de Brie is said to have planted the first ever nigella in France. No doubt from here the plant quickly hopped over the castle wall, swam across the moat and headed for the hills.

Those of you who experiment with Indian cookery may have used nigella seeds, but sadly these are not from this plant, but from Nigella sativa, a close relative. Indeed, the seeds of ‘our’ plant contain a poison called damascenine, so however much seed you harvest I would resist throwing it onto your naan bread. The plant may well have been used as a medicinal herb, however: there is evidence that it was brought to Austria in the Bronze Age by an immigrant population of miners. One possibility is that it was used as a vermifuge, to treat cases of intestinal worms – many poisonous plants were used in low doses in order to kill the parasites without killing the host. The plant is also said to be good for treating flatulence, though as Nigella sativa is said to be used to help with digestion I do wonder if there’s some confusion here. The seeds are also said to be used to keep insects out of clothing, so perhaps they would be handy against the clothes moths which seem to be everywhere in North London at the moment. Rubbing the seeds between the hands releases the essential oil, which is said to smell like strawberry jam.

The gardener Gertrude Jekyll was very taken with nigella, and included it in many of her cottage garden schemes. Indeed, the most popular of all the love-in-a-mist varieties is probably ‘Miss Jekyll’, a pale blue variety. Jekyll was a proponent of colour theory in her gardens, with blues and greys offset by vivid oranges and reds, so maybe my child’s seed selection wasn’t so far off the mark.

Of course, if you type ‘Nigella’ into Google you will not get this attractive little blue plant, but the rather attractive Nigella Lawson, cookery writer and TV presenter extraordinaire. I rather like Nigella. Her cookery shows on TV normally feature an episode in which she gets up in the middle of the night and spoons homemade icecream into her mouth illuminated only by the light from the refrigerator. Normally, she is wearing silk pyjamas and full make-up, and seems oblivious to the camera crew who have staked out her kitchen for just such an eventuality, much as wildlife photographers sit in a bush for weeks to catch sight of some nocturnal lemur.  However, she is not named for this pretty little plant, but for her odious father Nigel Lawson, professional climate change denier and a man with no redeeming features whatsoever as far as I’m concerned. So sadly, we shall have to move swiftly on.

Incidentally, in Germany, nigella is known as ‘Gretel-in-the -bush’ – in the Germanic version of the fairy story, Gretel is turned into nigella, and Hansel into chicory (which is known as ‘Hansel-on-the-road’ – two little blue flowers separated forever by habitat.

Now, Ms Lawson has somewhat hampered my search for a nigella poem – my results have included many works celebrating her comely form and delicious recipes, largely penned by somewhat overheated male poets of a certain age. So, instead, here is a painting.

The artist, Sophie Gengembre Anderson, was the first woman to sell a painting for over £1m in the UK, and her painting ‘Elaine’ was the first public collection purchase of work by a woman artist, so there is lots here to celebrate. ‘Elaine’ was based on a poem by Tennyson, and was purchased by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

Anderson was born in France, moved to the USA in 1848 to escape the Revolution of that year, and later lived in Falmouth in Cornwall. During her lifetime she painted everything from a series of portraits of bishops to still lives, but soon settled on the genre paintings that would make her name in the art world. She painted ‘Foundling Girls at Prayer in the Chapel’ for the Foundling Museum in London, where it still hangs. At a time when men were getting rich by painting decorative and sentimental images of children and women, Anderson managed to chip out a niche for herself. I suppose it’s not surprising that she isn’t as well-known as Sir Joshua Reynolds or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but to my eye she is every bit as accomplished.

And so, my nigella journey has taken me to some most unexpected places. In my minds-eye I am a little girl, leaning on my half-sized garden fork and looking over my tiny blue and orange flower-bed, while dad digs up the potatoes and wipes the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. I think I might even plant some nigella seed, just to have it in the garden to remind me.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Daniel Ullrich, Threedots – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=375714

Photo Two from https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/106194/i-Nigella-damascena-i-Miss-Jekyll/Details

Photo Three by By Cecile van Straten from Manila, Philippines – https://www.flickr.com/photos/chuvaness/29946044613/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61695788

Dear Readers, you might remember that I spent some of my formative years working in a night shelter for homeless people in Dundee. Sunday evenings there were typically quiet, and the men often spent them sitting in the kitchen and listening to the radio. There were two songs which many of them found particularly affecting. One was ‘The Lady in Red‘ by Chris de Burgh,  which would often end with someone surreptitiously wiping their eyes, lost in memories of happier days. But the one that would really get everybody going was ‘Lilac Wine’, originally by Nina Simone but recorded by Elkie Brooks in the ’90’s. Was there ever a better song about the melancholy drinker? Everything from her wavering notes to her tear-filled eyes encapsulates the way that alcohol both distorts thinking and intensifies emotion. However, I do wonder if she has a different lilac tree from mine, as even on a good day I would not characterise the scent as ‘heady’, maybe because my plant flowers in April when the rain and the wind (and the occasional snow) make sitting outside a heroic endeavour. Maybe it’s also because my lilac is white, rather than the usual eponymous lilac? Do tell me of your lilac experiences, especially if they involve ‘feeling unsteady’ and seeing things that aren’t actually there.

My venerable lilac tree has grown to prodigious proportions. When I first moved into the house, all the flowers were at the top, some six feet above my head, and their fragrance was mainly enjoyed by passing starlings. Over the past few years I have been pruning out the old wood in an attempt to renovate the plant, and it seems to be working – this year I had flowers at eye-level for the first time in years. I cut a small bunch, put them in a glass jar and popped them down on my writing desk. For a while I just inhaled and admired them, until a moving pea attracted my attention. And when I took my glasses off for a better look, I saw a tiny spider, seemingly made out of green glass.

My garden wildlife book tells me that this is a cucumber spider, and I could not have been more surprised if I’d found out that it was a wildebeest. All my pruning and hacking suddenly seemed worthwhile, because if the lilac blossoms had still been at the top of the ‘tree’ I’d never have cut them.

Lilac has been in the UK since at least the sixteenth century, and is thought to have been brought here not from the Balkans, where it grows wild, but from the courts of the Ottomans. It didn’t reach North America until the eighteenth century, but has become so naturalized there that it is the state flower of New Hampshire. You can occasionally find lilac growing wild in the UK too, but generally close to human habitation. Indeed, a lone lilac bush can often be the first indication that there was once a garden on the site.

Now, to loop back to Elkie Brooks, I found myself wondering if lilac was much used as a culinary ingredient (after all, the plant is a member of the Oleaceae or olive family). I wandered out to the garden to munch on a flower, and found it a rather under-whelming experience – it was quite astringent (i.e. it dries up the saliva), floral, and a bit ‘green’, almost salady. My hunting through the internet revealed a recipe for lilac syrup on The Practical Herbalist, and from here I found a recipe for actual Lilac Wine. The latter website also has a link to all kinds of other ‘country’ wines, including rhubarb, beetroot and something enticing called ‘scuppernong’ wine. I am old enough to remember the days when any kind of fruit or vegetable was fair game for a spell of vinification. My Uncle Roy’s parsnip wine would knock your head off.

Medicinally, lilac was believed to be an ‘anti-periodic’ – that is, it could help to treat diseases such as malaria which occur cyclically. It has also been used to treat fever. In North America, the Iroquois people used it to treat sores.

Lilac (the white variety in particular) is yet another of those plants which have a reputation for bringing bad luck if brought into the house  – I have listed so many of these lately that it’s a wonder that there are any bouquets at all! A five-petalled lilac flower is also thought to be a bad omen, except in some accounts where it appears to be lucky, so my advice is, if in doubt, go for the happier interpretation. Lilac was thought to bring protection against evil if planted at the corners of a house, and I have always thought of it as a happy plant, one of the earlier signs that summer is on its way.

On the Plant Lives website, Sue Eland records a legend about the origin of the lilac in the UK:

 

Maybe as a result of this story, wearing white lilac is said to mean that you will never marry.

During the 19th century there seems to have been a lot of enthusiasm for the complicated, abundant flowers of the lilac. Impressionists were particularly enamoured, and they seem to have been trying to outdo one another in their depictions. I particularly like the Manet one, but maybe that’s because the flowers are so recognisably like the ones in my garden. I am also very partial to the hexagonal glass vase.

And finally, here is a poem by the American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925). This speaks to me, newly returned from North America, and it helps to settle in my mind the conundrum of why the lilac, a flower from Europe, has so intertwined itself in the American imagination that it is the state flower of the Granite state, the ‘Live Free or Die’ state of New Hampshire. This work takes my breath away. I hope you enjoy it too. Read it slowly, preferably with a cup of tea.

‘Lilacs’ by Amy Lowell

 

Dear Readers, whenever I see an amaryllis I always think of my Dad. His Christmas presents always contain at least one rectangular box containing an enormous amaryllis bulb and a pot, and sometimes I get one too. Then our phone conversations for the next month or so are mildly competitive.

‘Mine is about three feet high!’

‘Mine is so big that it keeps falling over!’

‘Mine has flowers the size of a baby’s head!’

‘MIne’s got flowers the size of a cabbage’.

Dad and I love to cross swords. If we are watching ‘Pointless’, the room echoes to a chorus of answers to Alexander Armstrong’s questions. For a while I was winning, but then, after Dad got his cataracts done, we realised that it was only because he couldn’t actually see what the questions were. Hah! These days we are neck and neck. Or maybe Dad’s slightly in front.

Anyhow, the amaryllis is a most bold and ostentatious plant. In my opinion there is no more spectacular indoor bulb. You can practically watch it growing. For a while it’s rather embarrassing to anyone with Victorian sensibilities, as it looks like a giant Martian willy. I almost feel that i should be covering it up with a lace curtain. And then the blooms form and start to open, and it seems impossible that there should be so much volume of petal in that little crumpled bud, but there it is. This year, my amaryllis is dark red, with petals that are simultaneously as sleek as satin and as plush as velvet. It is utterly glorious.

It’s important to clear up exactly what this plant is, however. The bulbs that we grow at home are not actually amaryllis (this name refers to some South African plants) but are from a separate genus known as Hippeastrum, which hales from Central and South America and the Caribbean. The name was given to the plant by William Herbert, a 19th century botanist and illustrator, and means ‘horse star lily’, for reasons which have faded into obscurity. There are 90 separate species of Hippeastrum and over 600 hybrids and cultivars, with new varieties being offered every Christmas – over the past few years Dad and I have competed with pale-green, stripey red and scarlet varieties. The original Hippeastrum species are normally red, pink or purple in colour.

The leaves on a Hippeastrum appear after the flowers, which is one reason why the developing buds look so extraordinary. The sexual organs of the plant, the stamens and pistil, are long and elegant. The pollen is plentiful but is poisonous to cats, so be careful if you have any moggie companions. As with lilies, the danger is that the pollen comes into contact with the fur and is licked off by the cat during grooming. The bulbs of some Caribbean species of Hippeastrum are used to produce arrow poison, so this is obviously not a plant to be messed with.

I have never yet managed to persuade my Hippeastrum to bloom for more than one year, but then I have been doing it All Wrong. The leaves should be allowed to develop, and the plant given some food on a weekly basis during this time, but then it will need two months ‘rest’ in the cold and dark, without food or water (and preferably with no nibbling by any rodents that may be living in the shed). Then the plant can be brought out into the light and watering re-commenced. The plant should be in a small pot, not much bigger than the circumference of the bulb,  with a good third of the bulb above the surface of the compost. This can make the plant very top heavy, of course, hence the occasional catastrophe when the whole lot falls over and the main stem breaks under its own weight. I can only imagine that the Hippeastrum that grow wild are rather less exaggerated in form, much as a fox stands more chance of survival in the wild than a pug would.

Incidentally, a properly cared-for Hippeastrum can live for 75 years so I really have no excuse.

One thing that  I don’t associate with Hippeastrum is perfume, but apparently there are some scented varieties. The gene for scent is recessive, and is associated only with white or pastel coloured plants – I’ve never grown a perfumed one, but do let me know if you have, I am curious as to what it smells like. Sadly, the English language is very short on words to describe scent, probably reflecting our rather inadequate noses. If dogs could speak I imagine they’d have a very varied perfume vocabulary.

Medicinally, Hippeastrums contain over 64 alkaloid compounds, which as we have already noted are poisonous, but which are also anti-parasitic and have psychopharmaceutical properties. Some species of Hippeastrum seem to have interesting anti-depressant and anti-convulsant possibilities, and experimentation has indicated that the bulb may have possible uses as an antibiotic.

Just to return to the name ‘Amaryllis’ for a moment – Amaryllis was a Greek nymph who suffered with unrequited love for the cold-hearted Alteo. In a paroxysm of passion she pierced her heart with a golden arrow and trekked to his door every day for a month, leaving a path of blood splatters en route. These days we would probably call this behaviour stalking, but on the thirtieth day the blood spots transmogrified into red flowers of stupendous size and hue. Alteo finally fell in love with Amaryllis, her heart was healed, and the Dutch bulb trade lurched into action. The rest, my friends, is history.

You might expect that such a showy plant would inspire visual artists and, before he turned to abstraction, Piet Mondrian produced a number of startling ‘portraits’ of Hippeastrum.

And you might also expect that the amaryllis/Hippeastrum would invite the attention of poets, and so it does. I adore this poem by American poet Deborah Digges, who died in 2009 and who sounds like a most generous teacher of other poets. She explores both the beauty and the absurdity of the amaryllis, a plant which, in its super-abundance, teeters on the very edge of ‘too much’.

My Amaryllis

by Deborah Digges

 

So this is the day the fat boy learns to take the jokes

by donning funny hats, my Amaryllis,

my buffoon of a flower,

your four white bullhorn blossoms like the sirens

in a stadium through which the dictator announces he’s in love.

Then he sends out across the land a proclamation—

there must be music, there must be stays of execution

for the already dying.

That’s how your pulpy sex undoes me and your seven

leaves, unsheathed. How you diminish

my winter windows, and beyond them, the Atlantic.

How you turn my greed ridiculous.

Now it’s as if I could believe in having children after forty,

or, walking these icy streets, greet sullen strangers

like a host of former selves, so ask them in, of course,

and listen like one forgiven to their crimes.

Dance with us and all our secrets,

dance with us until our lies,

like death squads sent to an empty house, put down,

finally, their weapons, peruse the family

portraits, admire genuinely the bride.

Stay with me in this my exile

or my returning, as if to love the tyrant one more time.

O my lily, my executioner, a little stooped, here,

listing, you are the future bending

to kiss the present like a sleeping child.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Averater – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47076787

Photo Two by By Daniel Macher – AmaryllisUploaded by Epibase, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8933832

Photo Three by Pictures taken by Raul654 around Washington DC on May 7, 2005.

Dear Readers, last week I was in Dorset with my parents, and Dad had a horrible chest infection (or maybe a continuation of the one that he’s had for the past six months). In the space of 24 hours he went from being ok to being too weak to stand up unaided. Fortunately the doctor was able to visit, and prescribed him some antibiotics and some steroids, with the proviso that if he wasn’t any better he would be admitted to hospital the next day.

Steroids are miracle drugs, but they are also dangerous for long-term use. For a while Dad was taking them regularly, and by the end of a few months he could barely walk (muscle weakness and pain is a known side-effect). But a short course can have miraculous results. The next day dad was walking about, he had some colour back in his cheeks, and by the day after he was out ‘advising’ the men who had come to fit some new tyres to his car. And so I could at last breathe out (well, it felt as if I’d been holding my breath for 48 hours) and go for a little walk. As I headed towards the shop, I spotted this sprawling, inconspicuous plant. It could easily be mistaken for chickweed, if it wasn’t for its tiny, pale blue flowers and its lobed leaves. It was leaning into the sunshine on every verge and under every hedge. One lone plant had even stationed itself on one of the lovely shale walls in the village. For a moment I mistook it for its close relative, ivy-leaved toadflax.

The flowers of this species are very pale, almost lilac, rather than the deep blue of other speedwells. The stems and leaves are hairy, but the leaves are the distinguishing feature, being wider than long, and with obvious veins. There are about 15 species of speedwell in the UK, but this one is an arcaeophyte, introduced probably with grain from mainland Europe before 1500 BCE. It grows in the nutrient-rich, trampled soils that exist around human habitation and, like all the speedwells, was thought to be lucky for travellers, with the more showy species such as germander speedwell being worn as a buttonhole by those about to set out on a journey.

The genus name ‘Veronica’ comes from St Veronica. She is said to have wiped the blood from the face of Christ, and the handkerchief that she used bore the ‘vera iconica’, the ‘true image’, of his features. There seem to be many folk tales concerning the picking of the plant, which will bring dire consequences: either your mother’s eyes will fall out, your eyes will fall out or birds will come and pluck your eyes out for you. I suspect that the white centre of speedwell species is seen as an ‘eye’ by those of an imaginative disposition, and speedwells often have vernacular names such as ‘blue eyes’.

The plant was at one point so popular as a cure for gout that it was picked almost to extinction in London, where boozing was presumably as much a problem in medieval times as it is these days. Speedwell was prescribed ‘to be taken in the spring for some time, especially by Persons who drink much ale and are in gross habit of body’. A tea made from speedwell is said to be beneficial for pretty much everything, and the plant itself is sometimes added to salads, though the leaves and flowers of this species are so small that I wonder if it would be worth the bother. Probably better to let it alone, to be food for the extremely rare Heath Fritillary’s caterpillar (though in truth it prefers germander speedwell if there’s any available).

One reason for the name ‘speedwell’ is thought to be that the petals fall quickly once the plant is picked. The painting below is by  John Everett Millais and is called ‘The Little Speedwell’s Darling Blue (1891-2)’ This is an example of the ‘Fancy Picture’, which was a style that was very popular and lucrative. Millais tried to make the genre more painterly and serious by depicting the compulsory small, attractive child with emblems of mortality, such as flowers or dead birds or bubbles. Here, the infant is musing on a speedwell (admittedly not an ivy-leaved speedwell, but still) and is no doubt waiting for the flower to disintegrate. The whole notion of ephemeral also played nicely into the Victorian love-affair with the death of the young and the beautiful.

And to round off this week, we have none other than Oscar Wilde, grieving for the man who betrayed him ( the title means, roughly ‘Because I have loved too much’. I didn’t know this poem at all, but I rather like it as a description of passion, and I love the last line , although I am not quite sure that I understand it. Is Wilde saying that his love is one of many that has been showered on his lover? Someone enlighten me, please.

 

 

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Harald Süpfle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4197344