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…..

Spindle (Euonymus europaea)

Dear Readers, this week I am definitely cheating. I did deliberately plant some spindle in the native hedge in the garden, and this year it has flowered and set seed with some vigour, so I decided that I wanted to share it with you. Because, well, orange seeds and cerise seed pods are so extravagant that they look almost tropical against the dark twigs and yew foliage of the rest of the garden. And because I don’t know about you, but I could do with a burst of carnival colour to lift the ennui that seems to have settled about my head like a damp woollen blanket.

Spindle is a native plant which was cultivated in the past to provide hard, resilient wood for objects such as knitting needles, bird cages, pipes and, unsurprisingly, spindles for spinning. Nowadays it is used to provide high quality charcoal for artists and is also used by gardeners for its autumn seed pods and seeds, and for its foliage. The flowers are rather small, but are good sources of nectar and pollen – the Woodland Trust website mentions that they are particularly popular with St Marks Fly, a rather dangly insect that hovers over the heads of walkers on Hampstead Heath in great clouds for a few days every year. St Mark’s Day is on 25th April, which should also be peak blooming season for the spindle. We always think of bees when people mention pollinators, but flies do a lot more pollinating than they’re given credit for. The flowers of spindle are hermaphrodite, which means that they are capable of self-pollinating if there aren’t any insects about. However it happens, the result of the pollination is the pink, four-compartmented seed capsules in the photo above.

Spindle flowers (Photo One – see credits below)

St. Marks Fly (Bibio marci) (Photo Two – credit below)

Those orange seeds are, however, poisonous (causing symptoms similar to those of meningitis), and so is the wood. On the Poison Garden website John Robertson mentions that there are no documented cases of death through ingestion, but that there has been one case of problems arising through working with the wood, so I would suggest that care is taken not to inhale the sawdust. The seeds are said to have a ‘loathsome smell and bitter taste’ which I imagine would put most humans off but not, apparently, goats (according to the sixteenth century botanist and herbalist John Gerard). In some parts of Africa the sap from spindle was used as an arrow poison.

Because of its poisonous nature, the plant has largely been used in tiny doses as a purgative, and a decoction, with vinegar, has been used to treat mange in goats and cattle, and head lice in humans. A yellow dye can be produced from the seeds, though A Modern Herbal describes the effects as ‘fugitive’.

One other problem that I’ve noticed, and which John Robertson also mentions, is that spindle is a positive aphid magnet. Maybe it’s the soft, toothsome green leaves that do it. At any rate, it will look splendid at the beginning of April and will be eaten down to a stub by mid May if I don’t pay attention. I suspect that these aphids then spread out in search of other things to eat. Companion planting is probably the answer. However,if not completely defoliated by insects,  spindle can become a reasonably-sized shrub, as in the photo below.

Spindle tree (Photo Three see credit below)

Spindle has a whole host of negative folklore surrounding it. The genus name Euonymus comes from Euonyme, the mother of the Furies, after whom the plant was named due to its irritant properties (though I’d have thought that if you came to the attention of the mother of the Furies it would be rather more serious than mere irritation). It was said that if spindle flowered early, it signified an outbreak of the plague. Because it was used for toothpicks and also for ox-goads, it has an alternative English name of prickwood. To cap it all, the plant can be used as an ingredient in gunpowder. In fact, you might think that spindle is a thoroughly bad lot.

But then, I turn to ‘The Language of Flowers With Illustrative Poetry’ written by one Forget-Me-Not in 1835 and edited by one Mr Frederick Shoberl. In it, the author reflects that if you give someone a nice big bunch of spindle twigs (hopefully with intact rose-pink seedcases and vivid orange seeds), the message that the happy recipient should take from this gift is that ‘Your Charms are Engraven on My Heart.’ And very nice too! Provided, I imagine, that as you are composing a thank you letter to be written on your lavender-scented writing paper,  you don’t mistake one of the fallen seeds for an orange Tic-Tac, at which point a visit to A&E is strongly recommended.

Photo Credits

Photo One: (spindle flowers) – By AnemoneProjectors (Flickr: Spindle (Euonymus europaeus)) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two: (St. Mark’s Fly) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/drinkermoth/8421474862

Photo Three: (Spindle Tree) – By Wzwz – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21908282

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

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…..

Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus)

Dear Readers, I was flabbergasted when I found these flowers last week. I was in Whittington Park, just off Holloway Road, and decided to take a detour past an area which has been planted up to encourage sparrows. From a distance, I could see a faint blue glow amongst the dead and dying foliage.

When I got close, I could see that there were several cornflowers in full bloom. What a treat! They are normally summer flowers, so why they are bursting forth in November I have no idea. How exquisite they are. I had never really looked at the flowers properly before, but when I did, I noticed that they are actually comprised of a ring of small bellflowers. The colour is as blue as any flower gets.

The cornflower is an ancient introduction and is traditionally a plant of arable ground, introduced in the Iron Age from mainland Europe. However, improved seed cleaning and widespread use of herbicides meant that this plant has declined from 263 sites to just 3 in the past fifty years. This has also been the fate of many grain-field ‘weeds’, such as poppy, scentless mayweed, corncockle and field marigold. It’s true that many organisations are now trying to reintroduce these plants by using seed mixes, but Clive Stace, in his book ‘Alien Plants’, points out that originally these plants would have produced a patchwork effect in a field, with some areas blue, some white, some red and some yellow according to the microconditions of the habitat and the way that the field was managed. The best that we seem able to create these days is a mix of plants where no one kind predominates, probably because we either meddle too much, or because we leave too well alone. The effects that used to happen as a byproduct of the way that we managed land are now lost to us.

This is not to say, however, that cornflower was not something of a pest in the cornfields of old. When grain was harvested by sickle the tough stems were said to blunt the blade, hence one of the plant’s many alternative names, ‘Hurt-sickle’. Even the poet John Clare wrote of the cornflower as ‘troubling the cornfields with their destroying beauty’. It was clear that, as Mabey says, it would soon ‘get its comeuppance’. In today’s search for ever higher productivity, there seems to be no place for a plant which interferes with return on investment.

Cornflowers are members of the daisy family (Asteraceae) and are annuals. The seed has a long life in the seedbank, and Mabey reports how some seeds which had been buried in the 1930’s germinated in the 1990’s.  It has a wide variety of vernacular names, which is characteristic of a plant that has lived with us for a long time: here are just a few of the English language names collected by Sue Eland on her Plant Lives website.

Another alternative name for the plant is ‘Bachelor’s Button’ – it was said that if a flower placed in a button hole survived, the young man wearing it would marry his current sweetheart. It’s also said that bringing the plant indoors will make bread turn mouldy.

In ‘Flora Britannica’, Richard Mabey tells of how, on the 50th Anniversary of VE Day, world leaders laid posies of their national flowers around a large globe. Posies of cornflowers were laid by representatives from France, Germany, Estonia, Belarus and Czechia, an indication of how well-loved this ‘weed’ is across its whole range.

Not surprisingly, the blue colour of the cornflower attracted many who wanted to extract the pigment. It can be used as a dye for linen, as ink and as watercolour paint (by pounding the centre of the flowers in a mortar). It has apparently also been used to colour perfume and, surprisingly, wine. The flowers are used in potpourri for their colour, and very pretty they are too. Sue Eland mentions that cornflowers were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and that they retained most of their colour even though they were interred over 3000 years ago.

Cornflowers prepared for use (Photo One – see credit below)

It is no wonder that a plant so vivid should have a variety of medicinal uses. It has a long history in the treatment of tired and sore eyes: cornflower was considered to be the tincture of choice for blue eyes, while greater plantain was better for brown eyes. It was considered efficacious against the poison of scorpions, and the juice was said by Culpeper to ‘quickly solder up the lips’ of a wound. It was also considered to be good for mouth ulcers and sores.

Incidentally, the genus name of the plant, Centaurea, comes from the belief that the centaur Chiron taught mankind the benefit of healing wildflowers (when he wasn’t teaching Achilles, Ajax, Peleus, Hercules and practically every other hero of the classical world).

Having ascertained that cornflowers have medicinal uses, my mind naturally turned to that most perennial of questions – can you eat it? And I soon found the most intriguing recipe for Calendula and Cornflower Fudge, and if anyone makes any I would love to hear how it turns out – it certainly looks scrumptious. And how about a cornflower cocktail to go with it? Sounds like a perfect afternoon to me.

It will come as no surprise to learn that cornflowers have featured in the work of many artists, what with that spectacular colour and all. So, here is ‘Cornflowers’ by Sergei Ivanovich Osipov, a rather splendid still life painted in 1976.

Cornflowers by Sergei Ivanovich Osipov (Photo Two – see credit below)

And here is Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Cornflowers’, painted in 1890

‘Wheatfield with Cornflowers (1890) – Vincent Van Gogh (Public Domain)

But, to return to young men and cornflowers, here is Van Gogh’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man with Cornflower’. I love the mischievousness of this, and the way that the young man’s eyes echo the colour of the flower.

Portrait of a Young Man with Cornflower (1890) – Vincent van Gogh (Public Domain)

But I would like to end with a portrait by the Russian artist Alexey Venetsianov. I knew nothing about him prior to finding this painting, but was intrigued to learn that while painting peasants and people of ‘the lower orders’ was something that artists often did when they were looking for a romanic and picturesque subject, Venetsianov went out of his way to teach people from poor backgrounds to paint. When he was given the title of ‘Court Painter’ by Tsar Nicholas I, Venetsianov used the salary that he obtained to ensure that tuition at his art school was practically free. He even had some students who were serfs, which was unheard of at the time, when such people were considered as little more than beasts of burden. So,  here is his painting ‘Peasant Girl with Cornflowers’, in honour of his generous spirit and his good heart.

‘Peasant Girl with Cornflowers’ by Alexey Gavriloch Venetsianov (1820’s) (Public Domain)

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Rillke, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16045597

Photo Two – By Sergei Ivanovich Osipov – С. В. Иванов, http://www.leningradartist.com/7oci10b.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9928224

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

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…..

Mind-Your-Own-Business aka Baby’s Tears aka Mother of Thousands (Soleirolia soleirolii)

Dear Readers, seldom have I been so delighted to stumble across a Wednesday Weed than on this very drizzly Monday morning. I was meeting my friend A for a walk, but before we set off she took me to her garden to have a look at this plant. It had started off, innocently enough, in the cracks between some paving stones, but was advancing across her lawn with joyous abandon. I knew that one of its names was ‘mother of thousands’ (not to be confused with the succulent of the same name) but other than that the plant was a mystery , so I was pleased to find that it has a variety of vernacular names. The one that most British people seem to know it by is mind-your-own-business, with the alternative names of ‘angel’s tears’ and ‘baby’s tears’ probably referring to the tiny circular leaves (and the tears of gardeners as they try to get it out of their lawns without destroying the grass). It is also known as ‘the Corsican curse’, because this is where the botanist Joseph-Francois Soleirol first found it, though the plant is native to the whole of the northern Mediterranean region.

To look at, you might think that Mind-your-own-business is the terrestrial version of duckweed, but no. The plant is a member of the nettle (Urticaceae) family, surprisingly, and it is commonest in southern England and Ireland. It likes shady, damp places, such as the soil under shrubs or between the cracks in walls, and it is often found in churchyards, though in some places it can even grow semi-submerged as a bog plant. It is also a popular plant for vivariums (where reptiles and amphibians are kept) and you can buy it as a house plant too – it is especially fond of the humid atmosphere of bathrooms and kitchens.  It was introduced to cultivation in  the UK in 1905, and was living in the wild by 1917.

Pots of Mind-your-own-business (here called Helxine, its old Latin name).

One reason for the epic spreading ability of mind-your-own-business is that the plant roots at the nodes on the stem, as well as spreading by seed. The flowers are tiny, and each plant produces both male and female flowers, so is capable of self-pollination if all else fails. It is defined as one of the Royal Horticultural Society’s  ‘thugs’ because of the difficulty of eradicating it once it gets its roots under the table. For those of you who would like to try, the link for what to do is here. Read it and weep.

Female Flowers (Photo One – credit below)

Male flowers (right hand side) (Photo Two – credit below)

Mind-your-own-business and cyclamen (Photo Three – credit below)

Or how about creating a giant’s head and covering it in mind-your-own-business, as here in the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall?

Mind-your-own-business forms the green ‘skin’ of the Giant’s Head in the Lost Gardens of Heligan (Photo Four – see credit below)

Mind-your-own-business enjoying a cobblestone wall (Photo Five – credit below)

For such a tiny plant, mind-your-own-business has an unexpectedly ambitious and tenacious nature. It grows where few other plants can survive, and, like mosses and liverworts, provides an additional habitat for tiny insects and other invertebrates. Having no lawn, I am tempted to plant it myself! Maybe I have a friend who could dig some up for me…

Photo Credits

Photo One – Male Flowers: by Tico Bassie (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tico_bassie/3668761387)

Photo Two – Female Flowers: ©2011 Dean Wm. Taylor, Ph.D. This image has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license. If you have questions, contact Dr. Dean Wm. Taylor deanwmtaylor[AT]gmail.com. 

Photo Three: ‘Lawn’ and cyclamen: Doc Chewbacca on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/1094758917)

Photo Four: Giant’s Head: By Rob Young from United Kingdom (Giant’s Head / The Lost Gardens of Heligan) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Five: Cobblestone Wall: by Tico Bassie (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tico_bassie/3669569282)

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

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…..

Sweet Alyssum (Lobularia maritima)

Dear Readers, once upon a time you could not pass an English town hall without seeing a Union Jack made out of red geraniums, blue lobelia and white sweet alyssum, and the latter is still one of the most popular bedding plants in the country. After all, what’s not to like? It flowers abundantly from spring through to the first frosts, is low-growing and non-invasive, and has a sweet smell which many people compare to honey.The Wikipedia entry for the plant describes it as ‘the superhero of annual plants, with unparalleled drought and heat-resistance properties’.  The plant was first recorded in our gardens in 1722, and from the wild in the UK by 1807. Its original habitat, as the Latin species name suggests, was the beaches and dunes of the Mediterranean, and sweet alyssum has made itself at home in many coastal areas in the south of England. However, it is also a very adaptable plant, and can be found in many sheltered places, including the decidedly non-maritime streets of East Finchley.  Of the two specimens in my photographs, one comes from the N2 Community Garden plot in front of the children’s nursery opposite the station, and the other one has appeared at the bottom of a wall further up the High Street.

Also known as sweet alison or just alyssum, this plant is a member of the cabbage-family – its four petals, arranged into a cross (cruciform) shape might have given me a clue if I’d been paying attention. The stamens are bright yellow, and the whole plant has a great freshness to it. Although I’ve never seen it at the seaside I can well imagine the plant waving its head in the sea breeze. It is an invaluable bedding plant for gardeners, as those little white flowers attract many tiny wasps and hoverflies, which can make short work of your carrot flies and cabbage white caterpillars. For some lovely photos of alyssum used in companion planting, have a look at the Tenth Acre Farm website here, you won’t be disappointed.

Being a member of the cabbage family means that the leaves of the plant are edible, and are described as having a ‘peppery, cress-like taste’. The flowers are also said to be pleasant to eat, and I can imagine them adding a welcome pungency to a salad. The Eat The Weeds website says that the flowers also candy well, which I imagine means somehow coating them in liquid sugar or caramel. In my experience, there are few foods that caramel doesn’t improve.

The Alchemy Works website lists some interesting medicinal uses for this plant in its native range. Sweet alyssum was said to be used in the treatment of rabies (the name alyssum breaks down to a-lyssum, meaning ‘without madness’). In Afghanistan the plant is used for nervous disorders, and in Spain it is considered a diuretic and valuable source of Vitamin C (historically, it was used to treat scurvy).

Dear Readers, I have sometimes been something of a snob when it comes to what I plant in my garden – I tend towards plants that are difficult to get hold of, problematic to raise and temperamental in the extreme. However, just as in my life I have discovered that drama and emotional fireworks are no substitute for steadfast love and loyalty, so I am beginning to think that tried and trusted plants might be a better bet for my north-facing plot than some of the primadonnas that I am currently favouring. In the language of flowers, alyssum means ‘worth beyond beauty’, and I am thinking that a tough little plant like this, with its attraction to predatory insects, might be just the thing for the shallow, semi-shaded area around my pond. My father gardens by planting what is likely to be happy in the location that he has chosen, and he loves plants that thrive without needing to be cosseted like prize Pekingese dogs. I think, at 56 years old, I am finally realising that he’s right.

All photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share, but please attribute and link back  to the blog, thank you!

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…..

Cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium)

Dear Readers, I have always loved cyclamen – there is something about the way that the petals stream ‘backwards’ that remind me of the wings of a bird as it lands. At this time of year you can see lots of naturalised cyclamen in hedgerows, parks and other dryish places (the photos this week were taken in my Aunt Hilary’s Somerset garden). The plants have been showing their cherry-blossom flowers in the UK since 1597(they are originally from the area around the Mediterranean), and have been here long enough to acquire a vernacular name – ‘Sowbread’. There are variations on this name in several of the European countries from which the plant came: ‘pain de porceau’ in France, for example – and this is presumably because the pigs ate the tubers when they were rooting in the woods in autumn.

At first glance, it’s difficult to imagine what plant family cyclamen belong to, but if you look into to the lower part of the flower, where the stamens are, you’ll see that it looks rather like the middle of a primrose. And this is the family to which cyclamen has finally been allocated, after a brief flirtation with the Myrtles, a most unlikely place for this plant to end up. Genetics has solved a lot of strange taxonomical anomalies: when I was growing up, giant pandas and red pandas were placed in a family together, even though they shared few obvious similarities. What a relief when geneticists discovered that giant pandas were exactly what they looked like –  bears – and popped them back with the rest of the family. Though I imagine it made no difference whatsoever to the pandas, who just carried on munching the bamboo.

There are 23 species of cyclamen in total, but the one that is naturalised in the UK is Cyclamen hederifolium. One reason that the plant is so valuable in a garden is its very late flowering: the leaves and flowers die back completely during the spring and summer (probably a mechanism for avoiding the worst of the Mediterranean heat) and then reappear, almost miraculously,  in the autumn. The leaves themselves are exquisite, heart-shaped and patterned in cobweb-white and the palest of green, and the species name ‘hederifolium’ means ‘like the leaves of the ivy’. I can see the resemblance. ‘Cyclamen’, incidentally, comes from the Greek word for ‘circle’. Many sources rather prosaically mention that this is because the tubers are round, but I wonder if it is because of the way that cyclamen appear, flower and disappear in a circle of life. As they can be remarkably long-lived plants (up to a hundred years) I wonder if they seemed both mysterious and eternal.

Although the flowers are usually pink, there is occasionally a white one.

The tubers of cyclamen were used in a variety of ways. In ‘A Modern Herbal’,  it is suggested that a tincture of the root, applied as a liniment, would cause ‘purging of the bowels’ (so stand well back!) Juice from the root is said to be poisonous to fish, and an ointment made from the tuber is said to expel worms. All in all, the action of the plant seems to have been about getting various things out of the body which shouldn’t be there.

Given that the root of cyclamen has such purgative qualities, and that it also contains saponin, a most unpleasant-tasting chemical, I was surprised and pleased to find that there is one recipe which uses cyclamen leaves rather as vine leaves are used in dolmades in Greece. The History of Greek food website is a great source of information on the uses of many of the foods of this area, and for a Fava Stuffed Cyclamen Leaves recipe, just click here.

From Sue Eland’s ‘Plant Lives’ website I learn that, in the language of flowers, cyclamen is said to represent voluptuousness, diffidence and goodbye, a rather difficult combination to carry off I would have thought. A small cake made from the plant and baked will cause paroxysms of love in whoever eats it. The plant is said to offer protection from the ‘evil eye’ (and its close relative, Cyclamen persica, has been a house plant for centuries), but if a pregnant woman stepped over a cyclamen it was believed to cause miscarriage. If it appears in your dreams, it is a sign of calamity. All in all, it appears that you never know where you are with a cyclamen.

When I was in Hilary’s garden, I should have hunkered down and had a sniff of the cyclamen, for the pink ones, at least, are said to have a sweet scent. Here is Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864) on the cyclamen:

‘Thou Cyclamen of crumpled horn

Toss not thy head aside;

Repose it where the loves were born

In that warm dell abide.

Whatever flowers, on mountain, field,

Or garden, may arise,

Thine only that pure odor yield

Which never can suffice.

Emblem of her I’ve loved so long,

Go, carry her this little song. ‘

As you might expect, the unusual form of the cyclamen made it a favourite with still life painters, such as the remarkable Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, who worked in the Netherlands during the 17th Century.

‘Bouquet of Flowers in a Glass Vase’ by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1621)

However, they have also inspired more recent painters. Koloman Moser, whose painting is below,  was a member of the Viennese Secessionists, a group that included Klimt. The plant was to be a big influence in Art Nouveau generally, with its love of the natural world and the exotic. And I can see why people were influenced to record the fleeting beauty of cyclamen. To see those flowers, poised as if to take flight, amongst the fallen leaves of autumn is to experience a brief moment of wonder.

‘Cyclamenstock’ by Koloman Moser (1868-1918)

Images of paintings in Public Domain. All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!