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…..

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)

Dear Readers, this member of the carrot family is easily distinguished by its yellow flowers and its very delicate, frond-like leaves that taste strongly of aniseed. If you were to dig it up, you would discover that it also has a fleshy bulb that has a similar flavour. The plant in the photo above was planted in the N2 Community Garden next to East Finchley Station, but I noticed that an intrepid seed had germinated in the gutter nearby, and at this rate it will be popping up all over the place.

Buddleia and fennel making a bid for freedom

Fennel  loves disturbed ground and has naturalised in many places in the south of England. Vigorous stands of the plant may often be found at the seaside, as if advertising fennel’s long association with fish.

Fennel is said to have been brought to this country by the Romans, and it is a Mediterranean plant. In fact, the Greek name for the plant is Marathon, and the plain where the Battle of Marathon took place means, literally, ‘the plain of the fennel’. The capital of Madeira is also named from the Portuguese word for the plant, giving us Funchal.  The English name ‘fennel’ apparently came from the Middle English for ‘hay’.

There can be little doubt that fennel was a deliberate introduction in this country, unlike some plants which probably stowed away in seed crops. Fennel has a long history of culinary use throughout its range, and many parts of the plant are used. The flowers, often described as ‘fennel pollen’, are currently cropping up in fine dining establishments across the land, and the seeds are a popular ingredient in bread and in spice mixtures such as panch phoron (from Assam and Bengal) and Chinese Five Spice. Plus, who can forget the little round steel dishes of mukhwas given with the bill at the end of an Indian meal? The seeds help to freshen the breath, but fennel also has a long-standing reputation for assisting with the digestion, hence this delightful ditty from the Middle Ages, reported by Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica:

In Fennel-seed, this vertue you shall finde,

Foorth of your lower parts to drive the winde.

No winde here! (Photo One, credit below)

The leaves and bulb are also widely used, in everything from salads to sauces. I must confess to having an aversion to the raw bulb: I am not a great lover of aniseed flavours at the best of times, probably due to the effects of an unfortunate cocktail of Ricard and Tizer imbibed at a friend’s house when I was fifteen (never again). However, when cooked slowly, or gently caramelised, I find it much more palatable.

Grilled fennel. Yum! (Photo Two – see credit below)

Fennel is also one of the key ingredients of absinthe, that delightful green liqueur that is about as far from Baileys as it is possible to get. Otherwise known as ‘the green fairy’, the drink was said to have hallucinogenic properties, and was a favourite tipple of, among others Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso and Aubrey Beardsley. One wonders how much of its fearsome reputation was due to, well, its reputation – it was a strong spirit for sure, but no stronger than many others on offer at the time. Maybe it suffered because of the Bohemian nature of many of its drinkers. And I’m sure that Dega’s picture ‘L’Absinthe’ wouldn’t have helped with the marketing. The spirit was banned in many parts of Western Europe at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, on the basis that:

Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.

‘L’Absinthe’ by Edgar Degas (1876)

However, the spirit was never banned in the UK (we never seem to have developed a taste for ouzo, or raki, or Pernod, although we are partial to licorice allsorts). Hence, quite recently there’s been a new interest in the spirit here, with initial imports coming from Czechia (where it was also not banned in the past). I suspect that drinkers of the spirit will not seem out of place on the streets of many parts of the country on a Saturday night, though the top hat might need to go…

Edouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker (1859)

It seems strange that a plant associated with making people go blind (among other things) should have a long history as something that strengthened eyesight. Here is Longfellow’s poem from 1842:

Above the lower plants it towers,

The Fennel with its yellow flowers;

And in an earlier age than ours

Was gifted with the wondrous powers

Lost vision to restore.

Pliny believed that when snakes shed their skins, they rubbed themselves against a fennel plant in order to restore their eyesight – the eyes of such creatures go milky just before they lose their skins, so it’s not a big jump to assume that they are blind.

It was also said to be a cure for obesity:

‘Both the seeds, leaves and root of our Garden Fennel are much used in drinks and broths for those that are grown fat, to abate their unwieldiness and cause them to grow more gaunt and lank. (William Coles, ‘Nature’s Paradise’ (1650) (Thanks to A Modern Herbal))

Lots of fennel in the N2 Community Garden next to East Finchley Station

We should not assume that we are the only creatures who enjoy fennel, however: the caterpillars of the swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon) are fans. This is a butterfly which is now confined to the fens in the UK, but is rather more widespread in Europe (indeed I saw one powering past when I was in the Alps last week).

Swallowtail caterpillar on fennel (Papilion machaon) (Photo Three – credit below)

Swallowtail (Adult) (Photo Four  – see credit below)

In North America, where fennel is an introduced plant, it may be used by the caterpillars of the anise swallowtail(Papilio zelicaon). How subtly different this species is, with its powerful wings and yellow and black livery – I wondered if it was migratory and needed to do a lot of flying, but apparently not.

Anise Swallowtail (Papilio zelicoan) Photo Five (Credit below)

Finally, let’s have a look at the use of the plant in Hamlet. When Ophelia has ‘gone mad’, she speaks to her brother Laertes:

‘There’s fennel for you, and columbines.—There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it “herb of grace” o’ Sundays.—Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.—There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say he made a good end (sings) For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy—‘

Fennel (and columbine) are presented to Gertrude. There was an Italian phrase ‘to give the fennel’, meaning to compliment falsely, and this is thought to have been the origin of the later Cockney phrase ‘to give flannel’ (i.e. to try to fool someone). More directly, fennel was a symbol of adultery, so wholly appropriate for the fickle Queen.

Like all members of the carrot family, the flowerheads of fennel are great favourites with the little pollinators like hoverflies and honeybees (I imagine that fennel honey would be a most interesting foodstuff). And so, it is something of a delight, even to those of us who are not overly keen on the flavour that it imparts so relentlessly to everything that it comes into contact with. Thank you once again to the Romans!

Photo Credits

Photo One (Fennel seed digestif) – By Nicolas1981 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18773548

Photo Two (Grilled Fennel) – By Darya Pino at https://www.flickr.com/photos/summertomato/3440076844

Photo Three (Swallowtail caterpillar) – By Superdrac – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33329657

Photo Four (Swallowtail Butterfly) – By Entomolo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48664965

Photo Five (Anise Swallowtail) – By Calibas – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3514460

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…..

Lucerne( Medicago sativa sativa)

Dear Readers, I am sometimes astonished at the plants that crop up in East Finchley. Where do they come from? How did they get here? One particular ‘weed’ hotspot is a little bed outside the corner house on Park Hall Road. One month it’s full of cleavers, the next it’s full of thistles, and this week, it’s full of lucerne.  And very pretty it is too, in its many shades of lilac and purple.

Lucerne is a member of the Fabaceae family, which includes peas, vetches and clovers, and if you look at the flowers you can see the characteristic lower ‘lip’. The leaves are in groups of three, but the most characteristic feature is the tightly-curled seedpod, which spirals around itself like one of those wacky Carsten Holler helter-skelters that were at Tate Modern a few years ago. The name ‘lucerne’ is said to have come from the Latin ‘lucerna’ or lamp, which makes me wonder if there were oil lamps that resembled the shape of the seedpod.

Lucerne Seedpods (Photo One – credit below)

Photo Two (Credit below)

Lucerne was introduced to the UK in the 17th century as a fodder crop, and is otherwise known as alfalfa (which is from the Arabic name for the plant). It probably came from south west Asia, and was first noted in the wild in the UK in 1804. The plant was first cultivated in ancient Iran, and in a fourth-century book about agriculture, Palladius notes that it can be cut four to six times in 12 months, and that a quarter of a hectare of lucerne will feed three horses for a whole year. Palladius also notes that fresh lucerne should be fed sparingly to cattle, who may develop bloat, and indeed domestic animals have a paradoxical relationship with the plant, sometimes developing photosensitivity and jaundice. However, it is a major source of hay and silage for cows and horses, particularly in North America, where in Arizona and Southern California a single field can be cut up to twelve times in a year.

It has never been much used for human food in the West, with most people encountering it as alfalfa sprouts. It was used as famine food during the Spanish Civil War, but in China the young leaves are used as a salad vegetable.

Photo Three (Credit below)

Like most members of the pea family, lucerne is a magnet for bees. There is a story that lucerne could not be grown commercially in the US until the honeybee was introduced to the country (it is not native north of Mexico), and pollination became possible. It is often the case that introduced plants do not become a problem if their pollinators do not arrive – Dave Goulson, who wrote the wonderful book ‘A Sting in the Tale’ describes how Tree Lupins only became problematic in Australia once the bumblebee arrived. I always find it interesting how these complex webs of life change when one of the elements is missing.

Indeed, there is a problem with the pollination of lucerne. When Western honeybees visit a lucerne flower, they are knocked on the head by the keel of the plant, which transfers the pollen. Neither you nor I would like to be hit on the head every time we went to work (though I’ve been employed at places where every day felt a bit like that was what was happening). So, the honeybees take to nectar-robbing – piercing the side of the flower to get at the nectar store without being walloped. Unfortunately this does not result in the pollination of the plant.

To avoid this happening, the beekeepers employed to pollinate the lucerne fields use a high proportion of young, innocent bees, who have not yet become jaundiced and cynical by their daily experiences. However, young bees are also not as expert at performing their tasks. Also, the bees quickly suffer from a protein deficiency induced by only eating lucerne pollen, which is missing one of the key amino acids.

Honey bee on lucerne (Photo Four – see credit below)

One answer is to use alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotundata) to do the pollination. These solitary bees, native to Europe,  produce no honey, but are very efficient pollinators of lucerne. They are transported in hollow plastic tubes, which they fill with leaves and use to raise their young. These are the bees of choice in the Pacific Northwest, with the poor old long-suffering honeybee being used in California.

Alfalfa leafcutter bee (Megachile rotundata) (Photo Five – see credit below)

In parts of the US lucerne is used as an insectary, a nursery for all kinds of predatory insects, and is often interspersed with cotton. The various ladybirds and lacewings and wasps that hatch in the lucerne go to work on the grubs that would otherwise eat the cotton. In return, the lucerne is harvested in strips to avoid killing the entire insect population.

Lucerne is a very drought-hardy plant -it has a root-system that can penetrate almost 50 feet to find ground-water. It can live for more than twenty years, but the plant is autotoxic – lucerne seeds cannot grow where there is already lucerne, and so crop rotation needs to be practiced. Like all members of the pea family, the roots contain nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which means that it improves the soil. As such, it was the most widely grown fodder crop in the world in the early 2000’s, with over 436 million tons grown, not just in North America but in China, Russia, Europe and Argentina. In 2009 over 74 million acres of the planet were used to grow lucerne. Not satisfied with this, the biotech giant Monsanto developed a GMO version of the plant that was resistant to glyptosate. This meant that fields could be sprayed with Round Up, which would obliterate all the ‘weeds’ but spare the lucerne. There has been a long-running court case in the US about the use of this plant, with many concerns about the possibility of cross-contamination with non-GMO lucerne. You can read all the gory details here, but suffice to say that Monsanto appears to have won, as usual.  Whilst here in Europe we tend to be cautious about GMOs, there are far fewer restrictions in the US. I shall watch with interest to see how this all plays out. I am not anti-science, but it seems to me that obliterating biodiversity in this way runs counter to the health of the environment. I sometimes wonder at what point we will stop messing with delicately poised ecosystems. As the Buddha once said, we are children playing in a burning building.

So, generations of domestic animals have been fed on this delicate ‘weed’ that has appeared, surprisingly, on a London street. And when I go hunting for a poem about lucerne, I find this by Les Murray, the extraordinary Australian poet. ‘The Cows on Killing Day’ is not an easy read, but I don’t think I have ever read a poem that imagines so sensitively what it would be like to be an animal. Have a look, and let me know what you think!

Photo Credits

Photo One (Lucerne Seedpods) – By Philmarin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two (Carsten Holler Slides) – Kirsteen at https://www.flickr.com/photos/commonorgarden/300219278

Photo Three (Alfalfa sprouts) – By Thesupermat (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four (Honeybee on lucerne) – By Ivar Leidus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50280387

Photo Five (Leafcutter bee on lucerne) – By Pollinator at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16375247

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…..

Enchanter’s Nightshade (Circaea lutetiana) (Photo by Shona Mackintosh)

Dear Readers, sometimes there’s a strange synchronicity about the Wednesday Weed. When I had lunch with my friend S earlier this week, she mentioned a plant with tiny white flowers that was taking over her garden. She sent me the photo above, and I was very puzzled. Then, on my way to teaching an English class in Wood Green, I saw a huge patch of exactly the same plant, mixed in with some black medick.

Thanks to some help from some botanists on the Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland Facebook page, it was identified as Enchanter’s Nightshade. And a very confusing plant it is too. For a start, it isn’t a nightshade at all, but yet another willowherb. It is a native plant but, as my friend has noticed, it can be a very persistent garden weed. However, Richard Mabey finds a subtle beauty in this modest plant, and notes how the flowers are ‘mounted like butterflies on pins’. He describes how many parts of the plant, from the leaves to the stamen to the petals, grow in pairs.

Enchanter’s Nightshade flowers (Photo One – see credit below)

Enchanter’s Nightshade demonstrating its ‘persistent weed’ characteristic (Photo Two – see credit below)

The species name ‘lutetiana’ comes from the Latin name for Paris, which was sometimes known as the ‘Witch City’, according to Wikipedia. However, Witchipedia thinks that the name refers to the character of Paris from the Iliad. Curiouser and curiouser.

In the painting below, Circe seems to have transformed a woman into an animal as well, judging by the lionesses. Also, her jumper seems to have fallen off.

Circe by Wright Barker (1889) (Public Domain)

Strangely, though, in spite of its fascinating name, enchanter’s nightshade does not appear to have a wide variety of medicinal uses. It is used to make herbal tea in Austria (which figures, as the plant has a high concentration of tannins). Where it is mentioned as a cure, the active part appears to be the berries of the plant but, not being a true nightshade, the plant has burrs rather than berries. A case of mistaken identity, I fear.

However, it was used in an aphrodisiac potion in the Highlands of Scotland, which would be slipped into the unsuspecting chap’s evening tipple. I am sure that much merriment ensued.

The burrs of enchanter’s nightshade (Photo Three – credit below)

To return to Circe and her ability to transform men into animals: I wonder if there is a deeper suggestion here that, rather than taking the tale literally, we are meant to question if all men are animals under the skin, with just the merest skim of ‘civilisation’ on top? How easy it is in these troubled times to see the more ‘bestial’ of our instincts coming to the fore. There is more than a hint of this in Louise Gluck’s poem ‘Circe’s Power’.

Circe and her swine (Briton Riviere, 1896) (Public Domain)

Photo Credits

Photo One (Flower close-up) – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=256430

Photo Two (Patch of enchanter’s nightshade) – By Willow (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three (enchanter’s nightshade burrs) – By Kristian Peters — Fabelfroh 14:54, 10 November 2005 (UTC) (Self-photographed) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons