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,

It’s a funny old life being an IT consultant. It’s a life that I’ve chosen because it gives me lots of flexibility (which I need to write, and to spend time with Mum and Dad), but, as my husband says, it can be rather ‘bumpy’. I can spend weeks sailing along working a couple of hours a week and wondering where the next crumb is coming from, only to suddenly have the gift of an impossible deadline, a mountain of work, and the possibility of being solvent again.

Such, dear readers, is my life at the moment. I have 50 huge complicated reports to convert in the next five days, and there is at least ten days of work.

So, I was not going to go far to find a Wednesday Weed, because I didn’t have time – I feel rather like a koi carp coming up for a gulp of air and then heading back to the depths of the silty pond. But look what I found!

Yes, growing in a corner of the garden by the hosepipe, there is a forget-me-not. As this is a plant that prefers damp places, I suspect that its location is no accident. I confess to never having really looked at one before, and what an oversight. I love the egg-yolk yellow middle, and the way that the edges of the petals form a kind of sunray pattern around it. It’s a member of the Borage family (yet again), and so the tiny buds bear that characteristically different colour from the open flower. And now I’ve noticed it in the garden I see it everywhere, popping up along the edges of paths and self-seeding in the flowerbeds.

The original name for forget-me-not was scorpion grass, apparently because of the curled nature of the flowerheads. I suppose I can see what they’re on about, though they look rather more pangolin-y than scorpion-y to me.

Richard Mabey argues that the name ‘forget me not’ is not as old as you might think: the name doesn’t crop up in Shakespeare, or in Chaucer, and first pops up in a poem by Coleridge, ‘The Keepsake’. On the other hand, that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, mentions that it is first used in English in 1398 by King Henry IV, and is a literal translation of the German word for the flower, Vergissmeinnicht. In the course of my investigations, I have discovered that to translate word for word from one language to another has its own verb, ‚’to calque‘. So there we go, another new word (to me at least).

There are many legends about how the forget me not got its name, most of them revolving around a creation legend in which God/a god is naming all the creatures and plants that he’s brought into being. A little blue flower cries out the equivalent of ‘Oi mate, howsabout me? Forget me not please!‘ and so the name has stuck. In a variation, God was giving the flowers their colours, and did forget about the forget me not, so had to give it a tiny piece of sky to make up for it. In medieval times the plant was a symbol of constancy and good faith, and this suits it, I think: there is something so humble and yet so bright about this inconspicuous little plant.

Forget me nots come from two places: Western Eurasia and New Zealand. How interesting that the two groups of species should come from such geographically distant areas! The plants have since spread to more or less everywhere: there are 74 recognised species, but over 500 variations on a theme, and the plant hybridises quite happily. There are over a dozen species in the UK, and this one is I think the commonest variety, the wood forget-me-not (Myosotis sylvatica).

You can buy packets of forget me nots and scatter them hither and thither in the garden, but to me they seem to be the quintessential wildflower, growing where they fancy in drifts of azure. They are an unexpected and often undeserved gift. I think Christina Georgina Rossetti had in about right in her poem ‘A Bed of Forget Me Nots’:

Is love so prone to change and rot

We are fain to rear forget-me-not

By measure in a garden plot? —

I love its growth at large and free

By untrod path and unlopped tree,

Or nodding by the unpruned hedge,

Or on the water’s dangerous edge

Where flags and meadowsweet blow rank

With rushes on the quaking bank.

Love is not taught in learning’s school,

Love is not parcelled out by rule;

Hath curb or call an answer got? —

So free must be forget-me-not.

Give me the flame no dampness dulls,

The passion of the instinctive pulse,

Love steadfast as a fixed star,

Tender as doves with nestlings are,

More large than time, more strong than death:

This all creation travails of —

She groans not for a passing breath —

This is forget-me-not and love.

But, dear readers, before I descend into the depths of Excel once more, I had to share with you a second poem, by none other than the man described as ‘the world’s worst published poet’, Mr William McGonagall of ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ (and you can read that masterwork here).  I shall leave it to you to decide if this tale of love is even better. To get the full effect of the irregular metre, you might want to read it out loud. But let it be said that I am a great admirer of McGonagall, for all his poetical disadvantages. I love his confidence, and his self-belief, and his preparedness to put his work in the public domain even if he wasn’t exactly Shakespeare. He apparently had no concerns with the critics’ opinion of his work, and he inspired the wonderful Spike Milligan. And  in addition, his middle name was Topaz.  I’m sure, if he was alive today, he would write  a very splendid blog, though I fear that the 140 characters of Twitter would have defeated him completely.

Forget-Me-Not