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, snake’s head fritillary is my favourite spring bulb. I am exceedingly fond of snakes, and so the strange scaly pattern on the purple flowers enthralls me. I love the elegance of the pure white flowers. I love the nodding heads, which only reveal their beauty if you turn them over.

However, it’s fair to say that the plant has an unfortunate reputation. One alternative name was ‘Leper Lily’, as the flowers are said to be the same shape as the bells that lepers had to carry to announce themselves. Vita Sackville-West called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay.’  As with many other flowers of a nodding habit, they were said to be hanging their heads in sorrow at Christ’s crucifixion.

Well, harrumph to all that. The fritillary family contains the only truly chequered flowers that I know (but do remind me of others if you can think of them!) Both parts of the Latin name for snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) refer to this feature: the Fritillaria part refers to either the Latin word for dice (fritillus) or (more likely to my mind) the word frittillo, which means a table for chess-playing (thanks to The Poison Garden website for this insight). This is also the root derivation for the name of the fritillary group of butterflies.

The meleagris species name means ‘spotted like a guineafowl’.

According to my Harraps Wild Flowers book, snake’s head fritillary were first recorded in the UK in 1578 (they are native to mainland Europe and Asia), but were not reported in the wild until 1736. However, there is a view that the plants are actually native, growing originally on the floodplains that extended from the Rhine and included the Thames before the opening up of the North Sea in about 5500 BC. They are now a plant of unimproved meadow which occasionally floods, a vanishingly rare habitat, and are considered to be Nationally Scarce. Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, mentions a few sites where the plants can be seen in quantity, including North Meadow in Cricklade,Wiltshire. He describes this meadow thus:

North Meadow (now a National Nature Reserve) is an ancient common, and what is known as Lammas Land. Its 44 acres are shut up for hay on 13 February each year until the hay harvest (apportioned by lot) some time in July. On old Lammas Day, 12 August, it become the common pasture of the Borough of Cricklade, and any resident of the town may put up to ten head of horses or cattle on it, or (after 12 September) 20 head of sheep. As far as is known, this system of land tenure has continued unchanged for more than 800 years, and the show at North Meadow may be the best evidence that the fritillary is a native species.’

Whatever their provenance, snake’s head fritillaries are certainly widely naturalised in many places, such as here in St Pancras and Islington cemetery, where they are outgrowing their original planting site and heading off in to the woods. I have some in my garden as well, where they don’t seem to mind the clay soil and the shade.

Although the snake’s head fritillary is such an exotic and enigmatic plant, it appears not to have been used medicinally – maybe its association with lepers was too strong for it to be considered useful. It is also poisonous, though there are no accounts of anybody tucking into a bulb and doing themselves a damage as there are with daffodils.  However, the plant is celebrated as the County Plant of Oxfordshire (due to Magdalen College Meadow being an important snake’s head fritillary site), and also as the provincial plant of Uppland in Sweden. And furthermore, it is also celebrated by me. This most curious plant cheers me up whenever I look at it, in much the same way as I am delighted when a new house spider turns up or when I discover an unexpected caterpillar in the lettuce. I find its snakiness a refreshing change from all the wholesome bulbs that are bursting forth at this time of year, and it reminds me that something (or somebody) doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Bob – Picasa Web Albums, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12365512

Photo Two – By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1680620

All other photos 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, on my way through Coldfall Wood last week, my eye was caught by a group of bright magenta flowers growing beside the stream. When I slithered across the mud to investigate, I was delighted to find a little group of honesty (Lunaria annua) in full flower.  This is another of those plants that has probably escaped, either from the local gardens or from the cemetery, but it has been recorded in the wild since at least 1597 so it is a long-term inhabitant. Its native home is the Balkans and parts of south-west Asia.

Who would have thought that this pretty plant is a member of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae)? And yet a close look at its flowers give us a clue. All members of this varied tribe have simple flowers with four petals and four sepals, and the cross-like arrangement is what gives the group its alternative name of crucifer.

Honesty is probably more familiar from its seed-pods, whose semi-transparent nature are said to give it its English name. These are very popular in autumn flower arrangements, and also give the plant many of its alternative names: in south-east Asia it’s known as ‘the money plant’ and in the US it is known as ‘silver money’ or ‘chinese money’. In Dutch-speaking countries, however, the plant is known as judaspenning (coins of Judas), an allusion to the thirty pieces of silver Judas was given for betraying Christ. It is fascinating to me how a plant may have a reputation for plain dealing in one culture, and be seen as treacherous in another. Even in the UK, the Plant Lore website reports that in Yorkshire, some people believe that the plant is very unlucky, and won’t have it in the garden or the house, while in Kent it’s known as ‘the devil’s ha’pence’. On the other hand, the Magickal Gardening website reports that keeping one of the ‘coins’ in the pocket will attract good fortune.  I suppose that a plant with such evocative seedpods was going to attract all kinds of beliefs.

In her book ‘Fifty Easy Old-Fashioned Flowers’, Anne M. Zeman tells us that honesty has been used to dress wounds, and as a cure for epilepsy. She also tells us that the roots have been used in salads since the 1500’s. Furthermore, other sources describe how the seeds can be turned into a kind of mustard if mixed with vinegar – this is not surprising when we consider that the cabbage family contains many other plants with this property, including Black and Hoary Mustard.

Honesty, and in particular its seedpods, were very popular in the Art Nouveau movement, as in the illustration by Alfonso Mucha below (part of his 1900 precious stones series).

The Precious Stones series includes Ruby (which features of all things a poinsettia), Amethyst (with some irises) and Emerald (with Tradescantia). Mucha was such a favourite in our house when I was growing up that we had his ‘Moon and Stars’ series framed in the hallway. I have always liked his graceful female figures, and the way that he included plants and other elements of the natural world, even in his posters for theatrical productions and such necessities as Moet et Chandon champagne. If you are ever in Prague, I can recommend a visit to the Mucha museum. Although his paintings are a little too fey for many people’s taste in this more cynical age, I think that there is always room for a celebration of lush beauty and the abundance of nature. In this age of austerity, it’s easy to forget how much there is to be grateful for.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Christian Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1159063

Photo Two – Via Swallowtail Garden Seed https://www.flickr.com/photos/swallowtailgardenseeds/14985632221

All other photos 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, this is one of those plants that is so small and inconspicuous that it often goes unnoticed. Yet, at the moment, it is coming into flower at the bottom of every other wall around here in East Finchley. It has popped up in a pot of last year’s hyacinths that I left in the garden too. But until I did a little bit of research I didn’t even know its name, and until I paid it some attention I thought it was shepherd’s purse. Silly me.

Hairy bittercress is a member of the cabbage family, or Brassiceae, and I have been told that it can be used in the same way as mustard-and-cress. Unfortunately, every plant that I have seen locally grows in the splash-zone of the neighbourhood’s numerous dogs, so I haven’t tasted it to find out. The seed pods are said to explode when touched (again, none of the ones that I’ve seen have been so obliging, but then they probably aren’t ripe yet). However, the way that the seedpods send the seeds cascading all over the place has given rise to several of the plant’s other common names, such as flickweed and shotweed. I am delighted to tell you that the technical name for this process is ‘explosive dehiscence’, which is such a wonderful phrase that I shall be seeking ways to slip it into ordinary conversation.

Hairy bittercress is a native plant, and, under its Old English name of stune, is one of the herbs used in the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, which was used as a treatment for poisoning and infection. However, the plant is a keen traveller (often hiding away in imported garden plants) and has made itself known in North America. Here, the flowers are an early nectar source for the spring azure butterfly (Celastrina ladon) and the falcate orange-tip (Anthrocharis midea).

I wondered a little about why the plant was called the Hairy Bittercress, when it looked remarkably glabrous to me. It is said to be hairy at the point where the leaves join the stem, but as neither of my two pairs of glasses seem to enable me to see this kind of detail, I must take my hand lens next time I’m plant hunting. If you are trying to distinguish this plant from its close relative the wavy bittercress (Cardamine flexuosa) you will need to work out whether the plant has six stamen (in which case it’s Hairy) or four, which is diagnostic for Wavy. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get a precise identification for a plant. It’s truly one of life’s little pleasures, though flora have a way of hybridizing and otherwise being unruly which makes it much trickier than you would think. Even at the level of tiny plants subsisting in a quarter of an inch of substrate, life is anarchic and unpredictable in a most delicious way.

If you have access to a less polluted supply of hairy bittercress than I do, you can wilt it like spinach (which apparently tames the eponymous bitterness a little), use it in a salad, or turn it into pesto. The Eatweeds website has a recipe for hairy bittercress harissa, for those of us who fancy a bash at North African cooking, and for hairy bittercress and roasted beetroot salad, and I have no doubt that the wonders of the internet will reveal many more uses for this little plant. Its bitterness is said to help with liver detoxification, and in these days of ‘clean eating’ and juice fasts, you could probably do worse than to eat some of your greens in the form of this little chap. My book Flowers of the Field by the Reverend C.A. Johns, which dates to 1913, tells me that the genus name Cardamine comes from the Greek cardio, the heart, and damao, to fortify. Whether this refers to a medical or romantic property of the plant I have no idea, but it has certainly lifted my spirits.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Walter Siegmund – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=854581

Photo Two – By Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren (Falcate Orangetip butterfly) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

All other photos 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, my first memory of bluebells involves a family outing to Epping Forest when I was six years old. We travelled in our Ford Popular (named Thunderball), an eccentric vehicle that had problems with hills and would grind its way to the top of an incline accompanied by shouts of ‘come on Thunderball!’ from my brother and I in the back.

When we arrived, we stepped into a wonderland – the bluebells were at their peak and the whole of the forest floor shimmered with a blue so deep it was almost ultra-violet. I seem to remember that my Mum had brought a shopping bag, and we dug up a single clump (a transgression that was not illegal in 1966). When we got home, Mum split them up and planted them in our pocket-handkerchief-sized garden, where they flourished to such an extent that they positively took over. Who could have guessed that, only forty-five years later, bluebell woods would have vanished in many places, victims of development and climate change, and have been ‘corrupted’ by hybridization in others.

At the weekend, I had a chance to compare two distinct bluebell populations. One is in Somerset, in an isolated patch of woodland between fields, where the bluebells are all unashamedly of the native species. The second is in our local North London wood and cemetery, where there is a much greater diversity of plants.

The classic way of telling the difference between native bluebells, Spanish ones and hybrids is to turn the little bell of the flower until you can see the pollen. In native plants, the pollen is snowy-white. In Spanish bluebells and hybrids, there is a hint of greenish-blue to the pollen. There are other differences, however. British  bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) are typically a darker blue than their Spanish counterparts (Hyacinthoides hispanica). The flowers of our native bluebell nod, and grow along one side of the stem, while the Spanish flowers are much more upright, and grow on all sides of the stem. Furthermore, the petals of the British bluebell are strongly curved back (recurved) at the end of the ‘bell’. The British bluebell also has a much stronger, sweeter smell than its Spanish relative.  So, telling the difference between a pure British bluebell and a pure Spanish one is relatively simple. The problem comes with hybrids (Hyacinthoides x massartiana) , which form a whole spectrum of variation between the two parent species. And this may not be such a bad thing. When I was on a Spring Flower walk at the Natural History Museum, the guide told us that the Spanish bluebell is much more resistant to drought than the British variety so it may be that, as the climate changes, the native bluebell will move north, and the Spanish/hybrid varieties will thrive in drier areas. As he put it ‘Spanish bluebells are better than no bluebells, surely’.

Bluebells have very special bulbs – they have contractile roots, which, as they contract, draw the bulb into deeper, moister soil. This may be why bluebells don’t flourish on the thin chalkland soils of some parts of the south of England. It may also explain why the bulbs often do badly in gardens, as many people who have tried this method of propagation will tell you. As my mother instinctively knew, bluebells really need to be planted ‘in the green’.  I wonder if a tiny relict population of Epping Forest bluebells is still growing in a back yard in Stratford, East London? It would be lovely to think that this is a possibility, though I fear that they vanished under a patio long ago.

Probably half of all the bluebells in the world grow in the British Isles, where they are typically a plant of damp, humus-rich woodland and are an indicator species of ancient woodland. They can also thrive in hedge-bank and pasture,  although large numbers of the plant may indicate that a wood used to stand there that has long been cut down. They cannot live in the acid soil of conifer plantations. Bluebells are largely pollinated by bumblebees, who are often on the wing early, when the plant is flowering. A bluebell wood is a wonder to behold, and, since 1981, the plant has been protected from marauders like my mum by the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which can impose a fine of up to £5000 a bulb if someone tries to trade in the plant.However, Richard Mabey believes that such is the value of bluebells for folk (like me) who are trying to establish ‘wild’ gardens that whole woods may be stripped. Ironically, ‘bluebell rustling’ is apparently most common in East Anglia, where the plant is rarest.

The bluebell is such a popular flower that, when the charity Plantlife was looking for ‘Britain’s Favourite Flower’ the bluebell was left off the list because it had already won a previous poll.

Why, I wondered, was the bluebell known as Hyacinthoides ‘non-scripta’? Richard Mabey comes to the rescue in Flora Britannica, as usual. Non-scripta, meaning ‘unlettered’, is to distinguish the bluebell from the hyacinth, which is said to have the letters ‘AIAI’ inscribed upon its leaves. AIAI means ‘alas’, and was said to have been caused by Apollo lamenting the death of prince Hyacinthus, for whom the hyacinth is named. Now, I just have to check out a wild hyacinth to see if it is ‘lettered’.

The sap from bluebells was used as a kind of glue to secure arrow feathers in the middle ages, and was also used to starch the ruffs of Elizabethan gentlemen, and as a bookbinders’ glue. It was once believed that a distillation of bluebells would prevent the voices of choirboys from breaking. In Plant Lives, Sue Eland recounts several ominous legends about bluebells. A child who goes into the woods to pick bluebells is likely to disappear, whereas an adult will merely suffer the indignity of being led about by a pixie until rescued.

The plant is said to be efficacious against snake-bite (at least, according to Tennyson), and its one major medicinal use is to combat leucorrheoa (which I had to look up, only to discover that it’s vaginal discharge. You’re welcome.)

As beautiful as a bluebell wood is, I didn’t manage to get a photograph that truly reflects the colour of the one in Somerset, or its shimmering, water-like quality. The photo below captures some of this, but maybe Gerard Manley Hopkins summed it up best in his lines in ‘May Magnificat’, where he calls the bluebell the ‘greybell:

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes

There is something about bluebells that makes me nostalgic. I remember the heady days of childhood, and the overwhelming sense of the abundance of the natural world from those expeditions to the woods. I hope that there will still be bluebell woods for our children to enjoy, and much of that depends on the woods themselves being protected.  I would draw your attention to the 63 Ancient Woodlands that are threatened by the HS2 rail line, for example. It seems that we need to be ever vigilant to protect our local habitats, be they bogs or beaches, sand dunes or heathlands. Once they are gone, it will take generations for them to achieve the same biodiversity that they currently have, and whatever ‘reparation’ is offered cannot replace what we have now. Local opposition does make a difference, so let’s keep our eyes and ears open to what’s being planned for our beloved places. You will be surprised how many other people care about them, and how powerful we can be if we work together.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Marion Phillips, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13376247

Photo Two – By Charles01 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7338999

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer