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…..

Red Clover (Trifolium pratense)

Dear Readers, to truly appreciate some plants you need to get down on your hands and knees and really study them. The flowers of red clover are so complicated, so gently unfolding, and so delicately coloured that if they grew at eye level I’m sure we would be more impressed than we are. As I watched this little patch of clover in the cemetery the blooms were continually fumbled by bumblebees, who seemed almost drunk on the nectar. Ah, there are many reasons to love clover of all kinds, but its generosity to pollinators is a long way up the list. And as a child I would sometimes pull the petals from the flowers for the little drop of sweetness at the heart. Nowadays, I’d be a bit more careful about whether the area had been sprayed with biocides.

Red clover is native to the whole of the UK, Europe and Western Asia, and has been naturalised in most of the rest of the world. It is a fodder crop, and, as another member of the nitrogen-fixing pea family, it is often used as a green manure. I love the way that the tousle-headed flowers brighten up a wildflower lawn – in the photo above you can see the clover hanging out with blue self-heal and black medick, and it is often a companion to white clover, birds-foot trefoil and many other plants.

Red clover is said to have a variety of medicinal properties. One, I notice, is as an aid to the symptoms of the menopause. If I’d known this, I’d maybe have collected some from the cemetery as a remedy for my hot flushes. As a young woman,  I was completely unprepared for the infernal character of the average hot flush, and the way that they can very effectively destroy that ‘sleeping’ nonsense for four or five years. Fortunately, I am now through the worst (says she, fingers crossed), and am looking forward to the focus and energy that everyone promises me on ‘the other side’ once my oestrogen has been offset by a hearty dose of testosterone. Never underestimate the power of a post-menopausal woman with a bee in her bonnet, that’s what I say.

You can make a very pleasant tea from red clover flowers. On the Roscommon Acres website, they have gone several steps further and made red clover jelly and red clover wine, though it sounds as if the main benefit is the colour that the blossoms provide rather than the taste. I got rather excited about a cocktail called Red Clover which was on the Absolut Vodka website, but sad to say it contains no red clover at all. On the other hand, red clover lemonade sounds, and looks delicious – have a look at the photos on the Adventuress Heart blog. Just the thing for a summer’s evening. I might even try it myself.

To finish, I would like to include this poem by John Clare. A labourer by birth, Clare composed some of the most closely-observed nature poems ever written. He was a troubled man, who suffered from depression, alcoholism and who was several times incarcerated in an asylum. Here is his poem about our Wednesday Weed. The description could have been written yesterday.

To a Red Clover Blossom

Sweet bottle-shaped flower of lushy red,
Born when the summer wakes her warmest breeze,
Among the meadow’s waving grasses spread,
Or ‘neath the shade of hedge or clumping trees,
Bowing on slender stem thy heavy head;
In sweet delight I view thy summer bed,
And list the drone of heavy humble-bees
Along thy honey’d garden gaily led,
Down corn-field, striped balks, and pasture-leas.
Fond warmings of the soul, that long have fled,
Revive my bosom with their kindlings still,
As I bend musing o’er thy ruddy pride;
Recalling days when, dropt upon a hill,
I cut my oaten trumpets by thy side.

John Clare (1793 – 1864)

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…..

Red Campion (Silene dioica)

Dear Readers, there is a ‘wild’  burial site in the cemetery, close to where I feed the foxes. I love this as an idea – I can think of no nicer place to be interred,. One area has been roped off, and it’s full of ox-eye daisies, grasses, speedwell and the pink flowers of red campion. However, it’s not plain sailing all the way, and it’s clear that there’s more work to be done on some of the other parts of area. Here, for example, are some of the docks. Many of them are so enormous that they actually look down on me, like triffids who are just waiting to pull their roots up before they take over the world.

This is the problem for anyone who tries to set up a wildlife meadow. In ‘real life’, these would be mowed regularly, to gather in the hay and to prevent the perennials (like the docks and sow thistles and bindweed) from setting seed. If this is neglected, within a year or two what you have is not a meadow, but scrub, and all the biodiversity disappears. On the other hand, I did see this very splendid red dock weevil, but I think he will need lots of little friends to cope with the sheer volume of dock leaves.

Anyhow, back to the red campion. This is a native plant, and a member of the Caryophyllaceae, the same family that includes chickweeds, stitchworts and pinks. The petals are very deeply notched, and the flowers always look to me like gears from a child’s model engine.

The Latin species name ‘dioica’ indicates that, as with annual mercury, the male and female plants are separate. The male flowers have ten stamen (though some might be buried within the capsule of the plant at any given time), and the female plants have 5 style (which look like little white hooks). The seed capsule has ten strongly down-curved teeth on the edge. I am currently doing the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s Identiplant course, for which I had to find ten plants and record how many were male and how many female. In my little sample, there were nine males and one female, which makes me wonder a little about whether there is something in the seed mixes used for ‘meadows’ which favours one sex over another, though I have no idea why this should be.

The genus name, Silene, comes from the Greek god Silenus, who was always drunk, and is often depicted swaying atop a long-suffering donkey. Now, the name Silenus is said to come from the Greek word for saliva, implying that Silenus was not only drunk, but drooling. What a delightful picture! However, the link with the Red Campion is that the female flower is said to produce a foam which helps to capture pollen from visiting insects. I have not seen a bloom doing this, but will keep an eye open and see if I can capture such behaviour on camera if I notice it.

Just to complicate matters, red campion contains a substance called saponin, which has been used in soap-making – indeed another member of the family, Soapwort, has historically been used for just this purpose. Maybe this is another reason for the ‘Silene’ Latin genus name.

‘Drunken Silenus Supported by Satyrs’ – Anthony van Dyck. Public Domain.

Red campion has a variety of alternative names, but one that I like is ‘Bachelor’s Buttons’, referring to the way that the plant was worn as a buttonhole by eligible males. However, it was also said to be one of the flowers that children should not pick, as it was associated with the death of parents – on the Plant Lore website, one person reports that the plant was known to them as ‘mother-and-father-die’. On the Isle of Man, red campion is said to be beloved by the fairies, and so it shouldn’t be picked by humans. The plant is also said to be efficacious in the unlikely event (in the UK at any rate) of being threatened by a scorpion: all you have to do it grab a handy red campion and hurl it at the offending arachnid and he or she will scuttle away. Never let it be said that you don’t learn useful things in the Wednesday Weed.

Medicinally, the flowers of red campion have been taken in a glass of wine as a treatment for kidney and liver complaints and internal bleeding. The crushed seeds are also said to be efficacious against snakebite, but on the Plant Lore website mentioned above, one lady, from Wales, said that her grandmother was convinced that a snake would come into the house if she brought a posy of the flowers, so it appears that you can’t win.

You might expect that such a bright-faced spring flower would attract the attention of poets, and you would not be wrong. Mary Howitt (1799 – 1888) was the author of ‘The Spider and the Fly’ (parodied by Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland’ as ‘The Lobster Quadrille). She was a most prolific writer, creating over 180 books, and wrote many poems for children. Among them was ‘Summer Woods’ (you can read the whole poem here, and a fine evocation of the joys of the great outdoors it is too).

There are many things to love about Mary Howitt, who had a most full and adventurous life, including relocating to Scandinavia (where she learned Swedish and Danish and proceeded to translate Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales), being friends with the Wordsworths and Charles Dickens,  and meeting the Pope. She was never separated from her husband William, and The Times had this to say about them:

‘Their friends used jokingly to call them William and Mary, and to maintain that they had been crowned together like their royal prototypes. Nothing that either of them wrote will live, but they were so industrious, so disinterested, so amiable, so devoted to the work of spreading good and innocent literature, that their names ought not to disappear unmourned.’

When I read about the lives of Victorians, I am amazed by the fullness of their lives, and the variety of things that they got up to. However, it would be a mistake to think of them as  exceptional. Every person, if listened to in a sympathetic way and asked the right questions, seems to have had an extraordinary life. We rarely think of our lives as in any way unusual, but if we stop to consider the experiences that we’ve had, the people that we’ve met and loved and influenced, the place that we have in our community and in our family, we might be surprised at the richness and complexity of our existence, the extent of our interconnectedness. In a world that seems to view other living things, including human beings, as expendable, it’s worth remembering how precious every single one of us is. Every single one of us.

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…..

Honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum)

Dear Readers, for me the heavy scent of honeysuckle conjures up memories of summer holidays when I was a child. There was the time in Pembrokeshire where we walked along a lane so fragrant with the smell of the plant that it felt as if we were drinking it rather than smelling it. As night fell, the bats appeared, flittering above our heads to pick off the cloud of mosquitoes that each member of the family was attracting. The highlight of the evening was when I hopped over a fence to attend to a call of nature and nearly squatted on a hedgehog, but that’s another story.

Then there was the time we stayed in a cottage just outside Carlisle, where the hedgerows were entangled with honeysuckle and old man’s beard. There was a Friesian cow in the field opposite and a few evenings after we arrived,  before our astonished eyes, she gave birth to a little black calf. She licked it clean and it tottered beside her, eventually finding her engorged udder. We went to bed filled with the warm glow of seeing new life being cared for so attentively. The following evening, the farmer took the calf away, and the mother paced and bellowed all that night and the next day, the calf answering from the shed where it had been put with all the other calves. It had never occurred to me, townie that I was, that there was such a high price to pay in suffering for our dairy produce, or that we were taking the food that was meant to feed another species entirely. I think I thought that cows just generated milk for the love it, like the happy cavorting cattle in the Kerrygold adverts that were popular at the time. And so, when I smell honeysuckle, it has an edge of something indecent about it, something decadent. Which is obviously not the fault of the poor plant.

Honeysuckle is a member of the Caprifoliaceae family, which also includes Elder, Snowberry and Guelder Rose. It is a native plant, and is pollinated by long-tongued bees and moths, who are said to be able to pick up the smell from half a mile away – if you watch carefully you can sometimes spot hawkmoths hanging around the flowers. The flowers themselves are like nothing else that one is likely to spot in an English hedgerow, and of course the aforementioned scent is a dead giveaway. I found this specimen in the cemetery, close to where the foxes are fed.

We might expect such an unusual flower shape to have encouraged artists and designers, and indeed it influenced William Morris, who used it as a design in several of his wallpapers and fabrics.

William Morris’s Honeysuckle fabric

It has also been seen as a plant of great sensuality. Shakespeare mentions it twice in ‘ A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, but in ‘Flora Britannica’ Richard Mabey includes a quote from  sixteenth century writer William Bullein, who gets quite carried away with the plants sensuous possibilities:

‘Oh how swete and pleasaunte is Woodbinde (Honeysuckle), in Woodes and Arboures, after a tender soft rain: and how frendly doe this herbe if I maie so name it, imbrace the bodies, armes and branches of trees, with his long windyng stalkes, and tender leaues, openyng or spreding forthe his swete Lillis, like ladies fingers, emong the thornes and bushes’.

No wonder that a honeysuckle bower was seen as a site for romantic liaisons of all kinds and was associated with faithful love, as in the self-portrait of Peter Paul Rubens below, with his first wife, Isabella Brant.

Peter Paul Rubens – ‘The Artist and his First Wife Isabella Brant in the Honeysuckle Bower’ (circa 1609)

However, the honeysuckle, for all its sweetness, can be a bit of a brute. In forests, it can disfigure young trees as it clambers up them for support, and the twisted branches were used as ‘barley-sugar walking sticks’.

You can see how the honeysuckle would distort the wood into the typical ‘barleysugar’ shape here. Photo One – credit below.

In the autumn, honeysuckle can provide a fine crop of red berries (which are mildly poisonous to humans, but which are said by the RSPB to provide food for thrushes, blackbirds and bullfinches). How I would love to spot a bullfinch, but no luck so far. If pruned back hard, honeysuckle is said to thicken up to become an ideal nest site, so I shall have to try this with the one in my garden this year, though how to square the pruning with the berry production is a bit of a quandary (all advice gratefully accepted!)

You might think that a plant which smells so sweet would have lots of foodie potential, but apparently not. I have found no recipes, not even for the usual candied flowers. However, it was apparently considered to efficacious in the treatment of eye ailments and for snake bite.

But it is in the folkloric aspect of the plant that my story comes full circle. In some places it was considered to be an unlucky plant that should never be brought into the household: it was said that it could cause sore throats, and that it could give young girls lascivious dreams (and I wonder if the languid scent of the plant was associated with both these phenomena). But in Scotland, it was sometimes gathered on May Day and used to garland the dairy, as a protection for the cows and the milk that they produced. I remember the smell of honeysuckle and climbing roses wafting through my bedroom window in our holiday cottage all those years ago, as the moon shone silver on the coverlet and the cow bellowed until she was hoarse. I doubt that any scent would have given her much solace.

Photo Credits

Photo One © Copyright Bob Embleton and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

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…..

Black Medick (Medicago lupulina)

Dear Readers, last week I was sitting half-hidden behind a gravestone trying to get some photos of the foxes when I saw two of them lope off along a grassy path between the tombstones. I decided to follow them, but of course they had disappeared by the time I’d gotten myself together – they are most elusive for such large animals, and I often sense them watching me with some satisfaction as I lumber past. However, what I did spot was a little patch of this member of the clover family, the intriguingly-named black medick. The citrus-coloured flowers remind me of lemon sherbet.

You might think that the name ‘Medick’ has some reference to the plant’s possible medicinal applications, but apparently not. The plant is closely related to alfalfa, and both are thought to have come from Media, a northern Iranian kingdom mentioned by Herodotus, and now largely lost in antiquity. The word ‘Black’ probably refers to the colour of the seeds.

Black Medick seeds (Photo One – see credit below)

Black medick is a common native plant, found in all parts of the country except for the north and west of Scotland. It can also be found throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa, and has even made its way to many islands, such as Taiwan and Madeira. It can survive at an altitude of up to 1800 metres, and is cold resistant.  It is a member of the pea and vetch family, and as such it helps to fix nitrogen in the soil, and is a source of nectar for honey, and a useful fodder plant. I love the way that the flowerheads look like complex origami, with each individual flower having that distinctive ‘vetch-y’ look.  It is certainly a plant that repays close inspection.

The complex flowerhead of the black medick (Photo Two – see credit below)

This little plant, with its trifoliate leaves, is sometimes seen as the original shamrock of St Patrick , though these days this honour is more often passed to the larger, showier white or red clover. The finding of a four-leaved clover is considered especially lucky, as those of us who have scoured a meadow looking for such a thing as children will remember. I have always wondered why a four-leaved clover was seen as such a lucky thing (apart from its rarity, of course), and have read two explanations on the Flora of Castle Warden website. One is that a four-leaved clover grows where a mare has dropped her first foal. The other is that the four leaves stand for faith, hope, love and luck.

Whatever the explanation is, you can identify black medick even when it isn’t in flower by the tiny claw-like projections (mucro) at the centre of each leaf.

The leaves of black medick (Photo Three – credit below)

Although black medick is a useful plant for cows and sheep, it has a rather convoluted history when it comes to its ingestion by people. There are some worries that it might be problematic for pregnant women, or for anyone who is taking blood-thinners (Warfarin or Coumadin), or for children. However, in Europe the leaves have been eaten as a pot herb, and in North America the seeds have been used to make a kind of flower. The ever-useful Eat the Weeds website has a full run-down on the pros and cons of making your supper from black medick, but on balance I would incline towards leaving it for the bees and the other critters.

Black medick is one of the plants represented in Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies series, and although they are a little whimsical for my taste ( I prefer to think of fairy folk as being more mischievous and wild than the ones depicted here), I love how accurately the plants are represented (the flowers, leaves and seedcases are spot-on). I am also impressed by the butterfly wings on the fairies, which are fair representations of those of a female Large White.

Mary Cicely Barker’s ‘Black Medick Fairies’ (Photo Four – credit below)

I have used quite a lot of other people’s photos in my post this week, because there has been a lot of strimming and grass-cutting in the cemetery. When I walked the fox-path again, I found myself ankle-deep in dried grass, desiccated buttercup flowers and the crumpled faces of germander speedwell. The black medick is gone, for now. But it’s the cutting of these areas that keeps their diversity, and I have every hope that some plants will rebound, while others will have already set seed. For every area that has been cut, another is re-growing. The starlings and blackbirds are tossing the hay aside in their search for insects, and the bees are moving on to the red clover just flowering in the less tended areas. And me? I’m just thinking that I should not assume that anything will be here forever.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By S. Rae (https://www.flickr.com/photos/35142635@N05/15605449924)

Photo Two – By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2728945

Photo Three – By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2728955

Photo Four – By Sofi (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sofi01/4882620711)

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer