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, while I was passing All Saints’ Church on Durham Road in East Finchley today, I noticed that, despite everyone’s efforts, the Creeping Comfrey had crept back along the fence that edges the church garden. A few years ago there was a whole bed of the plant, its red buds and cream flowers nodding under the assault of what seemed like a hundred bees. It is a glorious plant, but one that has something of a tendency to take over. Last time I looked, someone had dug it up. But not, apparently, all of it, because here it is again, flowering in December ( a whole three months early).

I have written previously about Common Comfrey which is a much taller, rangier plant. This little chap only grows to about 40 centimetres tall, and, as my Harrap’s Wild Flower guide states, ‘spreads aggressively via sprawling leafy runners that root at the nodes’. The buds are a pinky red colour, which soon turns to creamy-white bells. I wonder why, though, it was called ‘grandiflorum’? It is to my mind a most modest little plant, and one that I am tempted to try to grow under the trees in my north-facing garden where nothing much thrives. It is often seen in churchyards (as here) and in shady places, so maybe it would feel right at home.

Unlike Common Comfrey, this plant is originally from the Caucasus and was first grown in gardens in the late 19th Century. By 1898 it had ‘jumped the fence’ and was growing in the wild. Like Common Comfrey, however, it can be used as a green manure, or rotted down as a liquid fertilizer, and there seems to be some agreement that the leaves can be used for external poultices for sprains and other injuries – after all, one vernacular name for the whole of the comfrey family is Knitbone, as the root was once grated and used as a kind of Plaster of Paris.

Another name for Creeping Comfrey specifically is ‘Cherubim and Seraphim’, maybe because  the fat pink buds  look like cherubs, and the white flowers resemble the robes of angels. . So, another appropriate ‘weed’ for the festive season!

Creeping Comfrey is such a useful plant that it has spawned a number of ‘domesticated’ varieties, such as ‘Hidcote Blue’ and ‘Goldsmith’, pictured below. As usual, though, I confess to preferring the unadulterated version. We constantly think we can improve on nature, and we are so rarely right.

This will be the last post before 2016 headbutts its way through the door. I wish you all a happy, healthy and inspired New Year, and hope that it brings you what you most need. See you next year!

Photo Credits

Goldsmith variety – Leonora Enking – https://www.flickr.com/photos/33037982@N04/4557977817

Hidcote Blue variety – By Lotus Johnson https://www.flickr.com/photos/ngawangchodron/16958103029

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 this last Wednesday before Christmas it was impossible to resist the temptation to feature a plant with a Biblical theme. And what should I find growing in the car park behind All Saints Church on Durham Road in East Finchley than a patch of Yellow Archangel (Lamiastrum galeobdolon argentatum). There are two forms of this plant: the one in the photograph with the silvery patches on its leaves is the cultivated variety, but the green-leaved variety is a native plant, and an indicator of ancient hedgerows and woods. However,  the silver-leaved garden variety is also cropping up in much wilder settings, such as the hedgerow behind my Aunt Hilary’s house in Somerset. In fact, the cultivated variety of the plant is now on Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which makes it illegal to grow it in the wild. The problem is that it spreads rapidly, and can impact on other, less robust plants. In the picture below, however, it seems to be fairly well integrated with the Goosegrass and the Wild Garlic (not that you would want to go petal to petal with either of these two bruisers).

The flowers of Yellow Archangel, as with all of the dead-nettles, are exquisite when viewed up close. They have co-evolved with the bees that pollinate them- the ‘hood’ of the plant bows down when a heavy insect lands, anointing the animal’s back with pollen, while the lower lobe acts as a landing platform. It amuses me to think how upset many Victorians were when evolution began to clarify the relationship between flowers and pollinators: previously, it was thought that the beauty of blossom was all about appealing to the human senses. In fact, as we now know, it’s all about ensuring the continuance of both plant and bee, an exquisite relationship that has developed over millenia. We are not the centre of the universe, after all.

The Latin species name for Yellow Archangel, galeobdolon, means ‘to smell like a weasel’, as apparently this is what the scent of the crushed leaves resembles. The plant also has the vernacular name of ‘Weasel Snout’.  I have never had the opportunity to catch a whiff of weasel, and I suspect that they are few and far between in my north London half mile territory. Nevertheless, here is a picture of one, because it’s Christmas, and what a gift this bright-eyed little predator is.

Yellow Archangel is closely related to both White Dead-nettle and Red Dead-nettle, but Culpeper tells us that for ulcers and sores, Yellow Archangel is more efficacious than the others.

Why Archangel, though? This name is used for many of the dead-nettle varieties, and Richard Mabey suggests that this may be because the plants have no stings. I wonder if there is also something rather angelic about the shape of the flowers, if you squint a little. I particularly love the Glaswegian name for the garden variety with its silver leaves – ‘Aluminium Archangel’. This sounds to me like a name for a piece of civic sculpture, maybe like the one below, at the N1 shopping centre in Angel, Islington.

So, dear readers, by the time I publish my next piece Christmas will be over for another year. I wish those of you who are celebrating time to rest and reflect and recharge in the midst of the maelstrom that the festive season has become, and to all of you I send my hopes for a peaceful spirit, an inspired heart and a healthy body with which to meet the year ahead.

Photo Credits

Yellow Archangel in flower – “Gele dovenetel DSCF3599” by Teun Spaans – Self made picture. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gele_dovenetel_DSCF3599.JPG#/media/File:Gele_dovenetel_DSCF3599.JPG

Wonderful Weasel – “Mustela nivalis -British Wildlife Centre-4” by Keven Law – originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout…. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mustela_nivalis_-British_Wildlife_Centre-4.jpg#/media/File:Mustela_nivalis_-British_Wildlife_Centre-4.jpg

Angel Wings Sculpture – By Chris McKenna (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], 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, a few years ago my husband and I went on holiday to  Jersey. The weather was glorious, and  one of my strongest memories is of the tropical coconut scent of the waist-high gorse that grew on the clifftops, and the sound of the ripe seedpods popping. So imagine my surprise at finding a small cluster of plants in flower on a rainy day in north London. Although there is a saying that ‘when the gorse is in flower, kissing’s in season’ I suspected that the plants would surely take a break in December, but no. And what a joy it is to see those butter-yellow flowers speckled with raindrops among all the mud and dying foliage of other, less enterprising plants.

Common gorse is a member of the Fabaceae or pea family, and like all members of its family helps to fix nitrogen in the soil and so to improve fertility. As a long-living, hardy, native plant, it has been used for a variety of purposes. Some relate to its prickliness – it can make a very effective hedge, spiky and long-lasting. Washing can be hung out to dry on gorse bushes, the spikes acting as pegs. Chopped gorse has been used as a mulch over germinating peas and beans to deter pigeons and mice. And the impenetrable thickets that the plant forms are great habitat for all manner of small mammals and nesting birds.

Despite its coarseness and abundance of spines , gorse has been used as food for cattle and horses, especially in north Wales where other sources of fodder may have been hard to come by. The plants are usually bruised in gorse-mills to soften them before being fed to the livestock. Humans have eaten gorse too – the pickled buds can be used like capers, and the flowers can be added to vodka or gin to flavour the spirit.

Pliny stated that branches of gorse could be placed in a stream in order to capture any particles of gold in the water, an ancient version of gold-panning.

Gorse has also had a long association with fire. It was used as firewood, particularly for baking, and was so popular that bye-laws were instituted to ensure that not too much was taken – Richard Mabey reports that under the 1820 Enclosure Act, the parishioners of Cumnor Hurst were allowed to harvest as much gorse ‘as they could carry on their backs’. In spite of its tough nature, gorse is not completely frost-hardy, and a particularly vicious winter can put paid to great tracts of the plant on open ground. It was therefore necessary to husband it as a resource, and to take only what was needed. Sustainability is not a new idea at all, but for most of the history of mankind has been seen as an obvious necessity. It’s only recently that we seem to have developed the idea that natural resources are never-ending.

Once burned, the ashes from gorse were used as an excellent fertilizer, or mixed with clay to form soap.

Gorse is normally a plant of open grassland (the very word ‘gorse’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘gorst’, meaning wasteland) and as such is subject to fires caused either accidentally (by lightning strike) or by deliberately in order to clear the land of old gorse bushes. As a fire-climax plant, gorse is adapted to these occurrences, and responds by putting out new green shoots, which can be used as softer fodder. In the right conditions, a single gorse bush can live for over 30 years.

In spite of its long flowering season, gorse has always been associated with the spring, and with the return of the sun. Gorse fires were set on the hillsides in at spring equinox, and burning brands of the plant were carried around the cattle herds to ensure their good health for the following year.  In Ireland, gorse was said to protect against witches, and it was also said that if you wore a sprig of gorse you would never stumble. In Scotland, it is said that Edinburgh will fall if the gorse does not come into flower. In Dorset and Somerset, however, it was unlucky to bring a sprig of the plant indoors, as if you did so a coffin was sure to follow shortly in the opposite direction. It is the sure sign of a plant that has been our companion for a long time that such a variety of beliefs has sprung up.

For me, gorse means heat, and skylarks singing, and a lizard skittering across a sandy path. It was not something that I expected to see today, one of those Sundays when the sun barely seems to get above the horizon before it sinks down again, exhausted. But what a joy it was to see those golden buds, and to remember that summer afternoon, something that I hadn’t thought about for years. My personal history seems to be written in plants and animals, each of them a talisman of a time and place.

Resources used in this post:

Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey – the best compendium of plant lore every published in my opinion. Endlessly interesting.

The Plant Lives website by Sue Eland – a gathering together of worldwide plantlore. Especially useful where plants have become naturalised  outside the UK, and are being used by local people

The A Modern Herbal website – all manner of medicinal, culinary and other uses for British plants.

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, last week I was surprised to find a specimen of Stinking Hellebore growing next to a bus stop on Fortis Green Road in East Finchley. What was this exotic-looking plant doing in such a prosaic environment? With its palmate leaves reaching out to tug at my ankles, and its pale green shoots, it looks like a small but friendly alien. It is unlikely that this is a truly ‘wild’ plant – most likely it is a garden escape – but it is also native  to the south-east of England. Whatever its status, it is a very fine plant, and one with many interesting characteristics.

Stinking hellebore is a member of the buttercup family, which is more clearly seen when the plant is in bloom.

The flowers contain up to ten nectaries, glands which produce nectar. Yeasts live in these nectaries, and raise the temperature of the plant, which enables the perfume which attracts insects to the blooms to be more easily diffused into the surrounding air. A hellebore containing a high density of these yeasts can be up to 7 degrees centigrade warmer than a plant with no yeast. Stinking hellebore is the first plant where such a relationship has been observed – usually plants which increase their temperature, such as the Cuckoo Pint, use chemical reactions within the plant itself. As the plant is a very early bloomer (some have recently been spotted in flower already in the south of England) it is a very welcome source of sustenance for all manner of early-flying pollinators, and maybe the temperature difference between it and the surrounding frigid air acts as a kind of homing beacon.

You might expect that the flowers of this plant would smell unpleasant, but in fact the plant is named for the smell of its crushed foliage, which is variously described as ‘pungent’ ‘unpleasantly mousy’, and ‘beefy’. It has a fine array of names alluding to its unfortunate perfume, including Dungwort and Stinkwort. However, it also has the rather obscure name of Setterwort. This appears to refer to the practice of ‘Settering’ which was used when cattle had boils or abscesses, and a thread made from the root of stinking hellebore was drawn through the infected area to draw out the pus. Maybe the chemicals in the root acted as a kind of antibiotic?

Stinking hellebore is also a traditional remedy for worms although, as the 18th century naturalist Gilbert White wrote:

“Where it killed not the patient, it would certainly kill the worms; but the worst of it is, it will sometimes kill both“.

It was especially dangerous when ingested by children. If lucky, the worms would be expelled from the child, but if the poison only resulted in the parasites retreating to the child’s stomach, a second dose might be administered, with fatal results.

In the ever-fascinating Poison Garden website, John Robertson describes how hellebores contain a substance called protoanemonin, which can cause skin problems. One incident involved someone who placed some nearly ripe hellebore seedpods in their back pocket and then drove for two hours to get home. The unfortunate person had serious blisters as a result of juice from the plant seeping through two layers of clothing. Clearly, this is a plant that needs to be handled with care.

John Robertson also describes how digging up a hellebore can be dangerous for your health. According to Pliny, if an eagle spots you engaged in such a task, the bird will cause your death, unless you draw a circle around the plant, face East and offer up a prayer before continuing with your spadework. One can only speculate as to how such legends grow up, but, having never seen anything bigger than a buzzard in the skies over East Finchley, I imagine that any hellebore transplanters will be relatively safe, though you might want to offer up a prayer just in case.

As one of the ‘baneful plants’ of witchcraft, Stinking hellebore is a plant that should be taken seriously – it is even said that Alexander the Great died from hellebore poisoning. However, it also has mystical associations, and is sometimes included as one of the ingredients of the ‘Flying Ointment’ that enabled witches to fly. It is also said to confer invisibility. And there can be no doubt whatsoever that to a hungry, cold queen bumblebee, emerging from hibernation on an unnaturally mild winter day, its nectar can be a life-saver. In my cold, shady, north-facing garden I think a few thickets of Stinking hellebore might be just the ticket to give some winter wildlife interest. I will let you know how I get on!

Photo Credit

Stinking hellebore in flower – “Helleborus foetidus0” by Kurt Stüber [1] – caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of http://www.biolib.de. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helleborus_foetidus0.jpg#/media/File:Helleborus_foetidus0.jpg

All other content copyright Vivienne Palmer

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, as we get into wintertime it becomes rather more challenging to find plants for the Wednesday Weed, especially as I have already covered more than a hundred of the botanical wonders that can be found within half a mile of my house. But it is also a time when overlooked leaves can suddenly be seen as other foliage dies away. Thus it was that, during my time at East Finchley Station car park a few weeks ago, I first noticed the bright leaves of Ribwort Plantain.

There are five species of Plantain in the UK, but Ribwort Plantain is one of the commonest. Its leaves are a dead giveaway – my Harrap plant guide describes them as:

‘strap-shaped to long-oval, tapering gradually to the stalk, with 3-5 bold, parallel veins’.

I could find none that were still flowering, but the blooms are immediately recognisable.

The flower heads are a source of food for finches and other small birds during the winter time, and for butterflies and moths in the summer – many wildlife gardening books suggest leaving a patch of these plants to grow in the lawn as a handy waystation for these creatures. However, in his very interesting book No Nettles Required, Ken Thompson explains how, during a survey undertaken in Sheffield, it was easier to persuade people to grow a container full of stinging nettles in their gardens than to sacrifice a corner of the lawn and leave it unmown. Lawn aficionados , in my experience, love to have an expanse of smooth green sward, however much hard work it might be to create and maintain this effect. However, a little corner of Ribwort Plantain and longer grass provides a much enriched habitat for all kinds of animals.

The flowers have also been used as a replacement for conkers: the long stem enables each participant to whack the other person’s flowerhead until it comes off. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey reports how the game holds remnants of history:

‘In Kent this game is known as ‘dongers’ and in Scotland (along with the plant itself) as ‘Carl Doddies’: ‘Carl and Doddie are diminutives of Charles and George, and the game is an obvious reminder of the ’45 Jacobite Rebellion, with Bonnie Prince Charlie and King George III trying to knock each other’s heads off’.

On the Plant Lives website, Sue Eland describes how another old name for the plant is Kemps, probably a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon word Cempa, or soldier, and most likely a result of this children’s game. Maybe it reminded the little darlings of battering one another with maces.

Ribwort plantain is a native, and has acquired a whole raft of medicinal uses. The Permaculture website describes how the plant has been used for respiratory, urinary and middle ear complaints. However, it pays most attention to the plant’s use as for wounds and insect bites:

‘Simply gather and chew a couple of good looking leaves, then apply the ‘spit poultice’ to the afflicted area. Bleeding stops very quickly, and broken flesh is rapidly sealed together, due to the astringency of tannins, and the soothing mucilage. Plantains are mildly anti-septic, so they also help prevent infection. In addition, these plants are really useful against insect bites and stings, especially for children. Once again, chew or scrunch up the leaves until you get the juices flowing, then apply.’

As with dock, ribwort plantain is such a widespread plant that it can almost always be found nearby, with the exception of areas of very acid soil. It is an indicator of agricultural areas in the pollen record, as it is a great lover of grassland and disturbed soils. As such, it has often found its way into the cooking pot. The leaves are said to taste slightly like mushrooms, and as usual you could add them to salads, but for the more adventurous there is a recipe for Aubergine and Avocado Bake with Ribwort Plantain here . And what a delightful website this is! I would heartily recommend a browse if you fancy Sea Purslane Hummous or Tansy Pancakes.

Finally, I cannot leave the subject of Ribwort Plantain without mentioning the Nine Herbs Charm. This was an Anglo-Saxon incantation to be used when someone had been wounded or poisoned. The verse on Plantain goes as follows (taken here from the Odin’s-Gift website):

‘And you, Plantain, mother of herbs,
Open from the east, mighty inside.
over you chariots creaked, over you queens rode,
over you brides cried out, over you bulls snorted.
You withstood all of them, you dashed against them.
May you likewise withstand poison and infection
and the loathsome foe roving through the land.‘

I love the idea of this wayside plant being creaked over by chariots and snorted over by bulls (though to be absolutely botanically accurate, Ribwort Plantain is much less tolerant of trampling than its cousin, Greater Plantain (Plantago major) which will no doubt be the subject of a future Wednesday Weed). And more than this, I love the way that this humble, modest plant was called the mother of herbs, and was recognised as a powerhouse of healing. I suppose that we were more observant of and more grateful to the natural world when we couldn’t just go to Boots for a tube of Savlon or call for an ambulance.