Chicory (Cichorium intybus)

Dear Readers, what a lovely, lovely plant this is! I don’t know of many flowers which are exactly this shade of lavender blue, and it was a pleasure to see a big stand of it at Heartwood yesterday. As you might have guessed, this is a member of the Daisy family (Asteraceae), and my Harrap’s Wild Flower guide describes it as an ‘ancient introduction’. But why was it introduced? Well, strange as it may seem, the ‘chicory’ that we see in greengrocers is just the cultivated variety of this plant, and both endive and radicchio are also descended from ‘wild’ chicory.

The plant has been cultivated in the UK since at least the early 16th century, when it was known as ‘succory’ – there were many tricks for producing the blanched spears, by forcing the plant in dark cellars (much like forced rhubarb) or under flower pots.

Belgian endive (Witloof)

Chicory root has also long been used as a coffee substitute – I remember drinking it as an impoverished student back in the late 1970s, though it was never a favourite. Apparently, in 1766 Frederick the Great of Prussia banned the importation of coffee, and a local innkeeper started to use roast chicory root instead.

The roots also contain a substance called inulin, which is a slightly sweet starch, also found in Jerusalem artichokes – it’s used by the food industry for sweetening, and as a ‘prebiotic’.

The leaves of the wild plant can be used as a salad vegetable, and the blue flowers are also edible – very attractive in a salad, I imagine. Chicory is also valuable as a forage crop – it sequesters selenium, which is an important element for cattle and sheep. In addition, domestic animals which have chicory in their diet seem to have a lower parasite burden.

With flowers as exquisite as this, it’s not surprising that folklore has grown up around chicory. It’s believed that it can open a locked door, but there are a number of requirements for how it’s picked – it must be gathered at noon or midnight on St James’s Day (July 25th, so you still have a few days!) Furthermore, it must be cut with a gold instrument, and the person cutting it must be silent, otherwise the harvester will die. Yikes! Just go to a locksmith, people. On the other hand, chicory harvested in this way can also grant invisibility, so maybe it’s worth it.

In Chinese mythology, the ‘silkworm mother’, who takes care of the silkworms, shouldn’t eat chicory or even touch it.

The leaves of chicory are the foodplants of the Marbled Clover moth (Heliothis viriplaca) and the Feathered Brindle moth (Aparaphyla australis), both moths of open grassland such as the kind we see above.

Marbled Clover (Photo by By © entomart Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=315028

Feathered Brindle (Photo by By This image is created by user Joop de Bakker at Waarneming.nl, a source of nature observations in the Netherlands. –  CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20562761)

And, while looking for a poem about chicory, I came across this one, by John Updike no less. I’m not sure that it’s great poetry, but it is closely observed, which always pleases me. See what you think.

Chicory
by John Updike

Show me a piece of land that God forgot—
a strip between an unused sidewalk, say,
and a bulldozed lot, rich in broken glass—
and there, July on, will be chicory,

its leggy hollow stems staggering skyward,
its leaves rough-hairy and lanceolate,
like pointed shoes too cheap for elves to wear,
its button-blooms the tenderest mauve-blue.

How good of it to risk the roadside fumes,
the oil-soaked heat reflected from asphalt,
and wretched earth dun-colored like cement,
too packed for any other seed to probe.

It sends a deep taproot (delicious, boiled),
is relished by all livestock, lends its leaves
to salads and cooked greens, but will not thrive
in cultivated soil: it must be free.