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…..

Dear Readers, I have noticed that when a plant wants to be featured in the Wednesday Weed, it makes its presence felt everywhere, and so it has been with Russian Vine. I first noticed it during my stumbling walk around the fields of Milborne St Andrew a few weeks ago, where it had grown over a fence and was intent on blocking the footpath.

Then, on my journeys back and forth from Surrey (where I am currently ensconced in Sutton Holiday Inn for four nights a week), I peered blearily through the window and realised that the trackside was a tumult of white flowers, tumbling over the back-gardens of Purley and Croydon like a foam-flecked wave. And, finally, when I took a walk along the unadopted road close to my house in East Finchley today, there it was again. I relented. This is a plant that wants its story told, for sure.

What we have here is a garden plant, originally from Asia, and known by such wonderful alternative names as Bukhara Fleeceflower and Chinese Fleecevine. However, most people will be familiar with it as Mile-a-minute plant. Many a gardener has planted one, gone indoors to make a cup of tea and come back to discover that it has taken over the shed and half of the children’s trampoline next door. Its flowers are a source of nectar for pollinators, but it has also been compared to the dreaded Leylandii Cypress for its over-enthusiastic and invasive nature. However, I am reminded that a ‘weed’ is simply a plant in the ‘wrong’ place, and so, while it can be a pain in a small garden, I would rather see Russian Vine along the edge of a railway line than the mass of wire fencing and fly-tipped building materials that it is probably covering.

Russian vine was first introduced to the UK in 1894, and was first discovered ‘in the wild’ in 1936. However, it has been pointed out that the plant is rarely found far from habitation, and that many of these ‘wild’ plants might actually be rooted in gardens, albeit gardens that are ten metres away.

Some of you might be thinking that you’ve heard the genus name Fallopia before in this blog, and indeed you have. Russian Vine is a relative of Japanese Knotweed and can interbreed with it. In the latest book in the superb New Naturalist series, ‘Alien Plants’, by Clive Stace and Michael Crawley, there is a very interesting discussion about how Japanese Knotweed has spread in the UK. In theory, because only female plants are present in this country, the plant shouldn’t be able to reproduce but, of course, it does. It has been found that Japanese Knotweed can hybridise with other species of Knotweed, and also with Russian Vine. Although these latter hybrids (named Fallopia x conollyana in honour of the botanist Ann Conolly who first investigated the genetics of this group) find it difficult to establish themselves, there are now three localities in which they exist, and one was first discoved in Haringey, not far from where I live, in 1987. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey reports that the hybrid is:

..’more elegant and less aggressive than either of its parents and has leaves shapely enough to make it a serious contender as a garden scrambler or ground-cover plant in the future. In the warm summer of 1993 it was being visited by many different species of native insect’.

Let us be grateful that this new plant seems to be taking on the gentler characteristics of its parents. If it combined the climbing ability of Russian Vine with the truculence of Japanese Knotweed we might have a candidate for a star part in a remake of The Triffids.

Photo Credits

Russian Vine (final photo on blog): “Fallopia baldschuanica 20050913 640”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fallopia_baldschuanica_20050913_640.jpg#/media/File:Fallopia_baldschuanica_20050913_640.jpg

All other photographs are copyright Vivienne Palmer

 

 

Dear Readers, long before the time when Trick or Treating became such a big deal in the UK, the big autumn festival was Guy Fawkes Night on 5th November. When I was a child, you could buy tiny fireworks for a couple of pennies each. They had names like ‘Traffic Lights’ and ‘Vesuvius’ and each one would last for about thirty seconds before puttering to a smokey end Our back garden was minuscule, and so my Dad was master of ceremonies for the evening. To start with, he’d light one firework at a time, and we’d stand and watch from the kitchen window. Catherine Wheels were always exciting Dad would nail them to the post that held the washing line, and my brother and I would scream with delight if it fell off and careered across the yard, sometimes trapping Dad in our outside toilet until it stopped sparking and sputtered to a halt. The evening usually ended with Dad standing in the rain, lighting four or five fireworks at once and then ducking back into the toilet to escape the miniature inferno. I can still see him, raindrops dripping from the rim of his trilby, sometimes with a cigarette in his mouth, as he tried to get to the end of the seemingly interminable array of incendiaries we’d managed to buy with our meagre half-crown a week pocket money. That’s love for you.

For some reason, this year as I’ve watched the approach of autumn, I’ve been reminded of the fireworks of my childhood. Gradually the trees light up, one at a time. An otherwise green tree might have the smallest hint of orange one day, and yet by the end of the week it’s aglow. It starts so gently that you might almost think you were still in late August and then, suddenly, there is colour everywhere.

Different colours appear in the leaves for different reasons. As the temperatures fall and the daylight hours lessen, a tree is no longer able to collect enough sunlight for growth. Furthermore,  a tree with its leaves still attached is more likely to be pulled over by the wind, and leaves also cause water loss during a season when much of the water needed by the plant is frozen. Therefore, deciduous trees fall into dormancy during the winter. The leaves, which harvested the sunlight and turned it into food, no longer have enough hours of daylight to sustain themselves.The main chemical which helped the plant to photosynthesise, chlorophyll, is what makes the leaves look green. When this ceases to be produced, the other orange and yellow pigments, normally masked by the green colour, can be seen. These pigments are beta-carotenoids, the same chemicals that make egg yolks yellow and carrots orange, and in some plants these are the dominant pigments all year round – think of some alders and Japanese maples, for example. At the same time as the colour change occurs, a layer of corky cells grow in the stem of each leaf, which causes abscission – the process by which the leaf detaches from the tree.

Red pigments are a different story. These are not hidden by the green pigments of summer, but are produced by the tree when about half of its chlorophyll has been used up. The pigments are called anthocyanins, and they are related to the breakdown of the sugars that the plants need. We can also find these pigments in cranberries, cherries and other fruits. Bright, cold days and chilly, but not freezing nights are thought to encourage the production of these scarlet and purple pigments. In most forests only 10% of the trees contain these pigments to any extent, but in New England and in parts of Canada up to 70% of the trees are full of anthocyanins – maples, sweetgums, dogwoods and oaks are amongst the species which can put on a spectacular show. Where present, these pigments can combine with the newly exposed yellows and oranges of the beta-carotenoids to produce a show of such unworldly beauty that it feels as if you are walking through a hallucinated landscape.

And when all this is past, we are left with the dead leaves of autumn, a pleasure in themselves as we scuff and rustle through them. The brown and copper shades that are left when everything else has faded are the true colour of the cell walls once everything else has past.

And after that? On the pavements you might see the ghosts of leaves, the shadow-outline that gradually fades like the after-image of the chrysanthemum burst of a Roman Candle. Winter is nearly upon us, but the trees are not going quietly. Just like the night that my dad accidentally set fire to a whole box of fireworks, the trees are putting on an exuberant final show, an over-the-top display of colour as if to make up for the dark, cold, wet nights to come. Let’s take a deep breath of chilly late October air, and enjoy the last great tree-show of the year.

 

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…..

Dear Readers, I am cheating a little this week as the photos of the spear thistle that I am including come from a field close to where my parents live, in Milborne St Andrew, Dorset. But as this is a wide-spread and abundant ‘weed’, I’m sure there is some within my half-mile, I just have to find it. Plus, as I discovered it during a walk which included almost falling down a rabbit hole and having to vault a five-barred gate (not so easy when one is an unfit townie who last had to climb over a gate thirty years ago) I was determined to feature it. Never let it be said that Bugwoman doesn’t go the extra mile. Well, half-mile anyway.

And, really, who could resist this plant? Yes, it’s what my plant book calls ‘viciously spiny’. Yes, it’s another one of those ‘Injurious Weeds’ in the 1959 Weeds Act. Yes, it grows in ‘rough and grassy places’. But the flowers are so magenta that they make me squint to look at them, and it is the national flower of Scotland, to boot – it was said to be a warning to landlords and others not to meddle with the privileges of the people. This is a plant that is tough and beautiful at the same time, and is also an absolute magnet for bees and butterflies during the summer, and for finches in the winter.

Even in October, a ladybird was sitting happily on the leaves, basking in the autumn sunshine and not minding the prickles at all.

How can you tell that what you’re looking at is a Spear Thistle, rather than some other less derided plant? Well, the spines on the bracts (the thing that the flower emerges from) are easily as long and sharp as any other thistle, and, in the right light, you can tell that they are tipped with yellow (you can just about see this in the ladybird picture above). The leaves are dark green with a pale midrib (again you can see this in the picture above). Furthermore, the stem apparently has ‘discontinuous spiny wings’, rather like a kraken one imagines. You can just about make them out (I think) in the photo below.

Spear thistle seems to be particularly fond of old, over-grazed fields, probably because most large animals won’t eat it, and so it survives, in great stands, when everything else has been nibbled down to the roots. It sets seed with great vigour, which is one reason why it made it onto the Weeds Act. However, it does not spread by the roots as creeping thistle does, and is therefore easier to control if you catch it before it those great fluffy clumps of thistledown start to fly past in the breeze.

Spear thistle is a native plant, and so we have had lots of time to get to know it. It has also spread to North America and Australia where it has set up home with typical thistle zeal.  It can be eaten – the stems can be peeled and boiled, and roots of young plants can also be added to a vegetable soup or hotpot, though they are described as tasting ‘bland’. A word of warning, however: they contain a lot of inulin, the same chemical that can make the after effects of eating Jerusalem Artichokes such a noisy, pungent and uncomfortable affair.

The genus name Cirsium is derived from the either the Greek word kirsion (a kind of medicinal thistle found in Greece) or the word kirsos which means a swollen vein. It should come as no surprise therefore that spear thistle has been used to prepare an ointment for piles. It has been used for a whole range of other purposes as well, however, particularly as a decoction for joint pain.

One use that has been picked up on both sides of the Atlantic is as tinder – the fluffy thistledown is an excellent fire-starter. The Cherokee people also used the thistledown to for the flights of their blow darts.

What is amazing to me, as I continue to hunt out Wednesday Weeds, is how how varied the plants within a single family can be. For example, spear thistle is part of the Asteraceae, or daisy family. Which also includes cornflowers, knapweed, chicory, all the hawkbits and hawkweeds and dandelions and our friend from last week, Bristly Oxtongue. It includes goldenrod, the fleabanes (Mexican and Canadian amongst others), sowthistle, tansy and feverfew. It embraces yarrow and hemp agrimony, fox and cubs and pineappleweed, the mayweeds and chamomile and a whole raft of ragworts. To come to terms with the Asteraceae is a challenge in itself, without all the rest of the plant families. Although in the UK we have an impoverished flora compared to the rest of Europe (the most recent Ice Age did for many of our plant species, though we are blessed with more than our share of mosses and liverworts) there is more than enough to keep the Wednesday Weed going for a good few years. Which is a relief, as every week I find myself more and more enthused about the plant community that’s all around us. There is so much still to discover and learn! Thank you for coming along with me.

Photo credits.

Unless otherwise stated, all photos are copyright Vivienne Palmer.

The Goldfinch photo is by Andreas Trepte (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

The thistledown photo is by John Tann from Sydney, Australia (Spear thistle) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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…..

Dear Readers, this week our subject, bristly oxtongue, is a truly ‘weedy’ weed, a plant of rough ground and disturbed soil. As its name suggests, it is a plant whose leaves are covered in swollen, blister-like spots. From each blister a little hairy hook emerges, which makes it as rough as ‘an ox’s tongue’. As I have never been licked by an ox, I cannot verify the accuracy of the plant’s name, but as that bovine  organ is used for tearing up harsh grasses, I can imagine that it would need something hook-like to give some traction. At any rate, these little blisters are indicative that, amongst all the yellow-flowered members of the daisy family, we are looking at bristly oxtongue.

Bristly oxtongue is an ‘ancient introduction’ – this means that it arrived in the UK before 1500. It has also found its way to North America, where it has quickly become a member of the Invasive Weeds lists of several states.  The plant is originally from the Mediterranean, which suggests that it could have arrived into the UK with the Romans, possible secreted away in grain stores. However, there could be another reason that this somewhat unprepossessing plant ended up here, and the clue is in its genus name, Helminthotheca. ‘Helmine’ refers to worms, and while it could be a reference to the shape of the fruit, it is more likely that bristly oxtongue was used as a treatment for intestinal worms. Whether the bristles acted as a kind of internal scouring pad, or whether there was some chemical attribute is unclear.

Bristly oxtongue is so prevalent in Buckinghamshire that it has been given the nickname ‘Milton Keynes Weed’. It is also known as ‘Langley-Beef’, a corruption of the French ‘langue du boeuf’ (oxtongue). Although the young leaves are said to be edible, they look as if they would be rather problematic, what with all those spines and blisters, and I suspect you’d be better off sticking to dandelions for your salad.

Like many plants in the daisy (Asteraceae) family, bristly oxtongue provides nectar for visiting butterflies and moths, and cover and food for many other invertebrates, such as the tiny beetle in the photograph below. This little creature was as shiny as a drop of mercury, and is, I think, some kind of flower beetle – we think of bees and butterflies when we think of pollinators, but flies and beetles also perform an important role.

Why, I wonder, does the bristly oxtongue have bristles in the first place? Most structures of this kind have developed to deter grazing animals, and I suspect that this is part of the story here too. But why is this plant so well protected, compared to all the hawkbeards and dandelions and sowthistles to which it is so closely related? The only clue that I can find is that unlike many other plants in the family, bristly oxtongue has very sparse sap. Anyone who has snapped the stem of a dandelion knows that it will quickly ooze a prolific and rather unpleasant white latex-like liquid, which is surely unpleasant to eat. Maybe the bristles have developed as a deterrent because the sap alone would not be enough. Who knows? But one thing that I do know is that, although the leaves are ugly to our eyes, the flowers, with their stamen like little calligraphy-squiggles, are a welcome food-source for passing creatures of all kinds, who notice them as even as we pass by without a second glance.

Photo Credits

Leaf hair macro photo by Derek Lilly (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode). More of his photos here (Jusben on morguefile.com)

Harford’s Sulphur Butterfly on Bristly Oxtongue by By Davefoc (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

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…..

Dear Readers, on Sunday I made a brief foray into Coldfall Wood to see how autumn was shaping up – after being away in Canada for a fortnight, and then working away from home for a week, I was eager to fit in a quick visit. The area around the winter pond was full of bulrushes and Michaelmas daisies, but the dominant plant was this one, broad-leaved dock.

I know nothing about docks of any kind, except that they are a) the cure for stinging nettle hives if the leaves are rubbed onto the affected area (my dad assures me that dock always grows close to nettles for just this purpose), and b) that they are long-rooted and hence a nightmare to dig out once they become established. My research for this piece has revealed that the taproot can be up to five feet long, which makes me wish that I’d thought about tackling the dock next to my rowan tree a bit earlier. Like, several years ago.  But here in Coldfall Wood, in the damp claggy soil of the pond, the broad-leaved docks seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Their rusty-red seedheads have a kind of ramshackle beauty about them.

One way to tell broad-leaved dock from the other members of the family is to have a look at the leaves. At the base, they are distinctly heart-shaped – the leaves of most other docks are strap-like. The fresh young leaves can be eaten like spinach, although grazing animals will avoid them, and the taste is said to be unpleasant. Furthermore, the plant is high in oxalic acid, so eating it should be avoided by those prone to kidney stones or joint problems. The leaves have been used to wrap cheese and butter (it is believed that this will keep the food fresher for longer), and adding a few dock leaves to a pot of water is said to make it come to the boil more quickly. This last belief is rather intriguing: when I have more time, maybe I’ll try a scientific experiment in the kitchen to see if there is something about dock that lowers the boiling point of water, or whether throwing anything into a pot of water would work as well – I’ve certainly seen water suddenly boil over when I’ve added salt or oil. The world is full of mysteries, to be sure.

This is a native plant in the UK, but like so many others it can now be found in North America too. Even in the UK it is designated as an ‘injurious weed’ in the 1959 Weeds Act (who knew there was such a thing?), and it is one of five weeds (the others are Curly Dock, Common Ragwort, Spear Thistle and Creeping Thistle) that the Secretary of State can insist are controlled even on private land. We have already mentioned the plants’ deep tap-root, but as it can produce 60,000 seeds wind-dispersed seeds per year, and as these seeds can survive for up to 50 years (due to a chemical that prevents microbial breakdown), I can see how it could be a problem on cultivated land. However, in my experience this is a plant that pops up in damp, claggy, over-grazed fields, where the competing plants have already given up the ghost. The plant is a symptom, rather than a cause.

In spite of it being part of this ‘hall of fame’ however, broad-leaved dock has a variety of medicinal uses, in addition to its efficacy with nettle stings (to which I can personally attest). A tea made from dock root was said to cure boils, and the leaves have been used to soothe burns and abrasions. The Iroquois Indians used a tea made from the plant as a contraceptive (though how successful this was is not known). The seeds have been used as a cure for tuberculosis and stomach infections, and also as a spice, although the recipes that I’ve seen are for curled dock (Rumex crispus) rather than for broad-leaved dock.

Broad-leaved dock is a member of the Polygonaceae family, which includes two other plants that have already been featured on the blog:  Redshank, and Japanese Knotweed. As you can see, it is a family of plants that can be problematic from a human point of view. I prefer to think of them as a family of survivors and opportunists, who will flourish when most other plants would fail. When I look at a stand of broad-leaved dock, I wonder if I am looking at a potential post-apocalyptic plant, one that will be here long after we are all gone. For some reason, I find its resilience strangely reassuring.