Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Elder Blossom (Sambucus nigra)

This week, I thought I would indulge myself by writing about Elder, one of my very favourite shrubs. I love the blowsy white blossoms  with their nose-prickling scent, half-way between gooseberry and cats pee. I love the dark berries in the autumn, and the enthusiasm of the starlings as they strip the shrub bare. I like the simple elegance of the leaves, and the fact that, unlike so many of the ‘weeds’ that I’ve been investigating, this one has been in England since records began.

Although the individual plants do not live very long, Elder feels venerable to me. It is a wild plant with real presence. Maybe it’s the weight of magical reference and practical use that gives it such heft. In some parts of the country, it was known as the Fairy Tree. If you burned it, you would see the devil, but grown by the house, it would keep the devil at bay. In the Middle Ages it became the tree on which Judas hanged himself, but it was also said to be the tree of the Cross.

In addition to being used for Elderberry wine and cordial, its branches have been used as switches to keep the flies from cattle on their way to market, and its stems, which are hollow, have been used as peashooters for generations (with an elderberry as a ‘bullet’ you can get a gratifyingly ‘bloody’ result).

Elderberries have been shown to be efficacious in treating flu, colds and congestion, and every part of the plant has been used in one way or another. But there is something about Elder that encourages me to be particularly respectful when I am cutting some blossom for cordial or harvesting berries. I almost expect it to reprove me if I  take more than I need, or behave with undue levity.

Not everyone agrees with me, however. Richard Mabey, in his magnum opus ‘Plants Britannica’, says:

‘It is hard to understand how this mangy, short-lived, opportunist and foul-smelling shrub was once regarded as one of the most magically powerful of plants’.

Well, we’re all entitled to our opinion, but if I was Richard Mabey, I think I’d walk carefully around any Elders that I happened to meet.

The magical Elder

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Few plants strike fear into the heart of the gardener like the Hedge Bindweed. Here it is having fun in the flower beds in front of Budgens on East Finchley High Street.

It is romping away over variegated foliage and pink roses, and is advancing towards the California Lilac, its long tendrils reaching out like lassoes. Only yesterday I noticed that my Comfrey was being dragged towards the fence by a Bindweed, and as I struggled to disentangle it, I noticed how strong the stems were, and how reluctant to give up their grip.

I have in my possession, courtesy of my Aunt Hilary, a 1913 edition of a botanical work called ‘The Flowers of the Field’, by the Reverend C. A Johns. Here’s what the author has to say about Hedge Bindweed:

‘In bushy places, common; and a most mischievous weed in gardens, not only exhausting the soil with its roots, but strangling with its twining stems the plants that grow nearby’.

A hundred years on, few of us would disagree. When I research the plants that I write about for the Wednesday Weed, most of them have some uses, medicinal or as food or for their position in the ecosystem. When I look for Bindweed, the first and often the only paragraph is about eradication.

And yet. Let’s have a closer look.

What do we have here?

As I hang around outside Budgens with my camera, delaying further the moment when I have to go home and actually do some work, I notice a rather large bumblebee. By her size, she is a newly emerged queen, and she is buzzing from one Bindweed flower to another, ignoring the overbred roses in favour of those pristine white blossoms. And what blossoms they are! Pure white and the size of a baby’s fist. I  love the way that the buds are twisted into the calyx, like a dancer with her skirt swirled about her.

If it wasn’t quite such a thug, I’m sure we’d be welcoming Bindweed into our gardens to cover up those ugly sheds and water butts and north-facing walls. Other members of the Bindweed family, such as Morning Glory, are cultivated with some enthusiasm. But Hedge Bindweed is just a little too energetic for most people, with a lust for life that is as inspiring as it is terrifying. After human beings are gone I imagine Bindweed covering the derelict London office blocks as easily as it does these flowerbeds, climbing inexorably towards the sky.

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Mexican Fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus)

On Sunday, I decided that things in the garden had gone too far. My deciduous hedge was slapping me in the face with a wet branch every time I went to the shed to get the  bird food. I’d been allowing the stinging nettles to do their thing in a quiet corner, but they had busted out and were popping up all along the path, patinating my ankles with blisters. The branch on the whitebeam was so low that my husband nearly brained himself everytime he went to collect the washing. A little judicious, gentle pruning and a modicum of cutting down and pulling up was required, just to make the garden habitable for people, plants and animals.

I went to collect the green wheelie bin for the bits that we couldn’t compost or put in the log-pile. It lives in the dark alley at the side of the house, which attracts a wide variety of volunteer plants: Yellow Corydalis and Greater Celandine, Buddleia and even an intrepid Foxglove. But as I got to the darkest, dreariest part of the path, a little plant glowed up at me as if lit by moonlight: a Mexican Fleabane.

Mexican Fleabane by the wheelie bin

The flowers of this little plant are very similar to those of our native daisy, but it has very different habits. While our daisy is low-growing and short-stemmed, keeping its head down to avoid the blades of the mower, the Mexican Fleabane is straggly and dangly, and is most at home in tiny pockets of soil. In some parts of the country, it can be seen clinging to the gaps between the bricks in a wall, tumbling down like a floral waterfall.

Like so many of the plants I’ve discovered, it has come a long way. It was named after a Hungarian botanist and explorer with the magnificent name of  Baron Wilhelm Friedrich Karwinski von Karvin (von Karvin Karvinski). He found his sample plant in Oaxaca, Mexico. It arrived in the UK some time during the nineteenth century, and promptly ‘escaped’. Today, it is found on the west coast of North America, all over Europe and even in Japan, where it is categorized as an undesirable alien. One person’s dangerous weed is, as always, someone else’s desirable garden plant, and indeed, if you fancy a Mexican Fleabane for your garden, the online garden centre Crocus will provide you with one for 7.99 GBP.

When I look at this plant, it makes me ponder on why we call somebody ‘weedy’. Are we complimenting them on their adaptability, toughness, resilience and savage beauty? Sadly, we are usually talking about a young man who has grown a little too tall for his girth, someone who is always picked last for the soccer team. I suppose that the Mexican Fleabane is a typical ‘weed’ in this regard – it is a droopy, unassertive little plant, a literal ‘wallflower’. Like many a human ‘weed’, however, it has the last laugh, having quietly succeeded in populating most of the planet where more aggressive, obvious plants have failed.

Furthermore, it appears that it is not called ‘Fleabane’ for nothing. In less hygienic times, dried fleabane would be put into mattresses to deter biting insects, and it has been suggested that the same can be done today in the beds of dogs and cats to keep the fleas away. Certainly it’s worth a try – I know that Roundup and such chemicals work, but I always worry about how they work, and whether they have any deleterious effect on the creatures that they are used on. If any one has a go, do let me know!

So, in my brief stint of tidying up, I managed to discover a new plant. I will be delighted if it spreads – a bee was investigating the flower as I left to write this piece. I might even give it  a little encouragement.

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Common Comfrey (Symphytum officinale)

There are plants that puzzle me when they turn up in the garden, because I don’t know what they are. There are plants that alarm me like the Bindweed that is wriggling its way over the fence. And then there are plants that fill me with delight. When I realised that I had Comfrey in the garden, with its long grey-green leaves and pendulous creamy-purple flowers, I greeted it as a long-lost friend.

Many years ago, I worked in Dundee, in Scotland. My boyfriend was a herbalist, and a keen cyclist. I had never learned to ‘go a bike’, but I was determined to learn. Needless to say I fell off, a lot. Whenever I did, Colin would reach for a strange, brown, mucilaginous ointment that he’d made from what he called Knitbone, and which I later realised was made from  Comfrey root.

To me, it seemed like a miraculous balm. Swelling and bruising  reduced within hours. I watched as Colin used the ointment when one of the pigs in the city farm that we worked on developed a sore foot. She was walking without limping within a day. I later learned that Comfrey contains a substance called allantoin, which promotes healing in connective tissue.

Here you can see the comfrey and also, creeping along the fence, the Bindweed that is certainly going to be a Wednesday Weed in the very near future….

Comfrey is a favourite with bees. After they have finished at the thistles, the bumblebees  make a detour to feed on the Comfrey for their dessert. At the moment, the plant is in prime condition, but in a few weeks’ time it will start to look a little dishevelled, with fallen petals and pollen all over those fine leaves. You can get some cultivated versions of Comfrey, which are a little longer-lived and better behaved, but I rather like these volunteer plants, who arrive in the garden with no warning and flourish in awkward spots where other plants would fail.

For the organic gardener, Comfrey is a wonder plant – it has a deep taproot which ‘mines’ the ground for minerals, particularly nitrogen and potassium, and so it can be used to improve the soil by putting these elements back. You can create a liquid fertilizer by stuffing a dustbin full of Comfrey leaves and leaving it to rot down – it will produce a thick black ‘goo’ which can be diluted one part to twenty with water. However, the evidence on the Internet suggests that this smells like ‘rotting corpses’, so you might want to take this into account if you have a small garden, neighbours in close proximity and a delicate stomach. I would be interested to hear if you have attempted this process, and if so, if you still have any friends.

For those who are faint of heart, Comfrey can also be used as a mulch or a green manure, which seems a little more user-friendly.

However, as I have only one Comfrey plant, I will be gazing at it with unbridled admiration and enjoying the bees that it attracts. By now, it probably has roots about three feet deep and will be difficult to dig out, even if I should have such an uncivilised thought. It reminds me of my younger, more reckless self, who was prepared to jump on a bike even if it meant falling off, and it fills me with a bittersweet nostalgia for those days long gone. Our lives go by so quickly and yet, here it is again, Comfrey in bloom, busy with bees. So much changes and yet so much stays the same.