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. as I was walking along a road in Muswell Hill last week, I nearly tripped over my own feet in surprise (when said appendages are a size 8, this isn’t hard to do). There was a tomato plant growing out of the wall. And by the lamp post opposite, there was another one.

So, today I popped back to take some photos. A black-clad waiter was rolling a cigarette and watching with some interest.

‘It’s a tomato’, he said helpfully.

‘But how did it get here?’ I pondered aloud. ‘Did someone drop a kebab and the tomato seeds from the garnish took root?’

He took a puff.

‘The vegetable wholesaler stops here to deliver to the restaurants’, he said, ‘And sometimes he just leaves trays of stuff here,  especially if it’s gone bad’.

Aha. Mystery (probably) solved.

When I started the Wednesday Weed, I suspected that I might sometimes find herbs – a stray mint plant, or a rogue rosemary, or a tenacious thyme. But I had no idea that I’d be finding vegetables (though technically, as any schoolchild will tell you, the tomato is a fruit). Still, this is an opportunity not to be missed, for sure.

As you can tell from the flowers, tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) are members of the Solanaceae, or nightshade family. There are several wild solanums in the UK, including bittersweet and, of course, deadly nightshade. However, the family contributes many foodplants, such as the potato (probably my favourite vegetable), the chilli and the sweet pepper.

The tomato itself originated in the Andes, and the name means ‘fat thing with navel’ in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The species name, lycopersicum, means ‘wolf peach’ – it was believed that deadly nightshade could turn humans into werewolves, and so the big, fat, red tomato must have been seen as a super-sized version.

I could not be more delighted with these two facts if I tried.

The Spanish brought the tomato to Europe following their conquest of South America with the first recorded instance being in Italy in 1531. However, tomatoes were initially believed to be poisonous, and so were grown initially as ornamental plants, with the first culinary use not being noted until the seventeenth century. Tomatoes were not popular with the peasant population either, as they were not particularly filling, and I can imagine that the first varieties were sour, unpleasant little things. A few hundred years later, we are tripping over tomato recipes, not only from Italy but also from the rest of Europe, and even the UK has grown to love that old perennial, tomato ketchup.

Incidentally, the Italian name for the tomato, pomodoro, comes from ‘Pomme d’oro’, or ‘apple of gold’ – there is some evidence that the first imported tomatoes were yellow, not red.

Although not a big consumer of tomatoes, China is by far the largest exporter of the plant, exporting 31% of the world total of 171 million tonnes. This is followed by India, and then the US.

The tomato was the first ever genetically modified organism offered for sale, with the ‘Flavr Savr’ variety being offered for sale between 1994 and 1997 in the US. It was designed to have a longer shelf life. Much of the deterioration in flavour and texture of the tomatoes offered for sale now is down to the need to have the fruit ripen uniformly, and this has led to a reduction in the natural sugars that give the fruit its taste. So often these days, the tomatoes look delicious, and taste of exactly nothing. Many of my cookbooks recommend giving tomatoes a miss during the winter months and using tinned ones instead.

I remember the tomatoes that my father grew on his allotment as a very different taste experience. The best way to eat a tomato is fresh off the vine on a day when the sun has warmed the fruit, and concentrated all that lovely flavour. There is also a special smell to a tomato just after the green leaves in the ‘navel’ have been plucked – someone once told me that a Scottish tomato always smells of mint.

For the fruit to develop, the flowers need to be pollinated, and herein lies a tale. In their native South America, tomatoes are pollinated by a species of sweat bee, which did not make the crossing to Europe. Fortunately, bumblebees of various kinds took up the challenge. The pollen is in the inside of the pistil, the long structure at the centre of the flowers of tomatoes and other solanums, and the bees learned that they needed to vibrate against this for the plant to release its bounty. This process is known as ‘buzz pollination’ or ‘sonicating’, and I will have more to say about this in my blog on Saturday. In the meantime, if you have any tomato plants that are still in flower, have a listen to the bees when they visit – you can distinctly hear them buzzing away vigorously.

The problem is, what do you do if you want to grow tomatoes, but don’t have any bumblebees? In Australia this is a major problem – there are companies who want to import bumblebees, but if they escape into the ecosystem there is no telling what problems might be caused. There is a trial using native Australian bees, but they will have to work out what to do with the flowers, so only time will tell. In the meantime, across the world, low-paid workers are cross-pollinating tomatoes with the help of a vibrating wand. Of the many jobs that it’s possible to do, this must be one of the strangest, not to mention the most labour intensive, because each individual flower needs to be treated. To see how all this works, have a look at the short film about the Vegibee, a handy garden pollinator aid. No guffawing at the back, please.

It will not surprise you that tomatoes have played a part in regional culture. La Tomatina, a Spanish festival, involves lots of semi-dressed people hurling over a quarter of a million tonnes of tomatoes at one another. And playing draughts with them, if the photo below is to be believed. It seems like a chronic waste of food to me, unless the tomatoes are already past their peak.

As my husband is Canadian, I would also like to celebrate the fact that the tomato is the Official Vegetable (‘Fruit!’ I hear you say) of Ontario, and that 15th July has been designated Tomato Day under the Tomato Act of 2016.

As you might expect, the tomato has featured in many still life paintings, what with its attractive colour and variety of forms. Here is one by Luis Egidio Melendez,painted in the late 1700’s and featuring the aubergine, another member of the Solanaceae family.

Here is Van Gogh’s ‘Still Life with Mackerel, Lemons and Tomatoes’ from 1886 and very delicious it looks too.

And here is a take on the fruit by Japanese artist Kanae Yamamoto from 1918.

What each painting seems to emphasize, in its own way, is the redness and the shiny skin of the tomato, but strangely, it’s the ones in the Yamamoto painting that I want to bite into. What do you think?

And in case you didn’t already fancy a tomato salad, here’s a poem by the sublime Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet murdered in hospital by the Pinochet regime following the coup in 1973. He had told his wife that he wanted to be reincarnated as an eagle and, when a friend visited their old home following Neruda’s  death, he found an enormous eagle in the living room. Which may, of course, be a coincidence.

‘the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.’

Indeed.

 

Photo Credits

Photo One (Lovely Tomatoes) – By Ewan at https://www.flickr.com/photos/the_ewan/2962762666

Photo Two (A Handful of Tomatoes) – By Scott Bauer / Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24784517

Photo Three (Tomatoes in a greenhouse) – By Lufa Farms [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four (Buzz Pollination) – By Bob Peterson from North Palm Beach, Florida, Planet Earth! – Buzz Pollination (Sonication), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38199019

Photo Five (The Tomatino Festival) – By flydime – La Tomatina (25.08.2010) / Spain, Buñol, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11911686

 

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 is interesting to see a plant that is actually in the process of escaping the garden and becoming ‘wild’. This little pink flower, a variety of hardy geranium known as Wargrave Pink (Geranium x oxonianum), is all over the entrance to Cherry Tree Wood, and can be found quite happily growing among the commoner ‘weeds’ such as dock and annual mercury. It has largely finished flowering but fortunately I got a few photos after a rain storm a few weeks ago. It seems to thrive in the dry, semi-shaded areas at the feet of the hornbeams and oaks, much as the blue hardy geraniums are happy at the feet of my whitebeam tree.

Like Montbretia, Geranium x oxonianum is a hybrid of two species: Geranium endressi, or Endre’s  Cranesbill….

and Geranium versicolour (Pencilled Cranesbill)

If you look at the picture below, you can see both the pink colour and the faint veining of the plant’s ‘parents’.Apparently, the plant was ‘found’ in the greenhouses of Waterer, Sons and Crisp in 1930, which implies that it came about accidentally. Waterer, Sons and Crisp was a company of nurserymen which was formed in 1676. In 1914 the company got into financial difficulties (probably not unrelated to the war, and the call-up of many of the staff), and so it merged with the Wargrave Plant Farm in Buckinghamshire, which is probably the reason for name ‘Wargrave Pink’. The nursery still continues today, specialising in azaleas and rhododendrons.

The name ‘Geranium’ comes from the Greek word for crane, geranos, and this also gives us the English name ‘cranesbill’. Both titles come from the appearance of the fruit capsule of some species, such as the bloody cranesbill (Geranium sanguineum) seen below. The fruit capsule springs open and the five seeds are thrown some considerable distance.

Incidentally, although those bright red flowers that adorn the window boxes of Austrian chalets are also known as geraniums, they are more correctly pelargoniums (although they are members of the same family as ‘our’ plant). Pelargonium flowers have a different structure – while geraniums have five equal petals, pelargoniums have two upper petals and three lower petals that  are different.

Hardy geraniums seem like very demure little plants to me, unlikely to inspire passion. And yet, in my search for interesting links to the plant, what do I come across but the poem ‘The Geranium’ by  Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It tells of dalliance in a woodland where geraniums bloom (species unspecified, but if you read the poem you will see that botanical accuracy is the last thing on the poet’s mind). Be warned that it is very explicit, so please don’t read on if you’re likely to be offended (though I also found it very funny). I can guarantee that you will never have read a flower poem quite like it. Here it is.

So, now that you’ve recovered, let me tell you a little about Mr Sheridan.

Sheridan was born in Ireland in 1751, and made his name as a playwright – his plays include ‘The Rivals’ and ‘School for Scandal’, both comedies of manners. ‘The Rivals’ includes the character of Mrs Malaprop, a woman forever using the wrong words in her attempts to sound more intellectual than she actually is, and a mainstay of comedy ever since. I have a distinct memory of a very similar character invented by the estimable Les Dawson.

Anyway, back to Sheridan. His private life was eventful. In 1772 he fought two duels with the same man, Captain Thomas Matthews, who had written an article defaming the  character of his wife-to-be. The first duel was bloodless and Matthews was forced to beg for his life and sign a retraction. However, Matthews then challenged Sheridan to a second duel. Sheridan wasn’t obliged to agree but, well, his honour was now in question.  In this second duel, both parties were injured, Sheridan seriously – he ended it with a sword sticking out of his breastbone, and his face beaten to a pulp. Matthews (who I think we can agree is the villain of the piece) fled in a carriage. Sheridan was not expected to survive, but somehow pulled through,

No sooner was Sheridan recovered than he married the lady in question, Elizabeth Ann Linley. Sheridan had no money of his own, and so they lived on the dowry in some style, entertaining their fashionable friends and generally making something of a splash. Mrs Sheridan was painted by Gainsborough, no less, some ten years after the marriage.

 

In 1778 Sheridan bought out David Garrick’s share of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. In 1809 the theatre burned down. On being encountered in the street watching the fire with a glass of wine in his hand, Sheridan is reported to have said ‘A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine at his own fireside’

Sheridan also had a long career as a Whig politician. He sympathised with the French and American revolutionaries, and was said by William Pitt and Edmund Burke to have made ‘the greatest speech ever made, ancient or modern’ when he called for the impeachment of the Governor of India, Warren Hastings, for corruption. Clearly his eloquence in persuading ‘the lovely Susan’ in ‘The Geranium’ could be put to many uses.

Domestic bliss was elusive, however: Elizabeth had a son with Sheridan, and a daughter with her lover, Lord Fitzgerald. Elizabeth died soon after the birth of her second child, and Sheridan continued to care for both children. The child herself died, aged eighteen months in 1793. Sheridan married again, but died in 1815, heavily in debt. He is buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. The Prince of Wales himself is said to have lamented ‘Poor Sherry!’ on hearing of his death.

So, what is the relationship between the witty Sheridan of ‘School for Scandal’, a man who was said to have never been coarse in his speech, and the author of’ The Geranium’? The poem was never published in his lifetime, but Sheridan certainly had a reputation as a man who could scarcely be alone in a room with a woman without trying to ‘seduce’ her (and I wonder exactly what ‘seducing’ involved in the 18th Century, especially if the woman was a servant and the man was a Member of Parliament). He seems to have been a lustful, rambunctious man, determined to drain life’s wine to the lees.

Incidentally a line from the poem, ‘All my body glows with flame’ turns up in a Bob Dylan song, the theme to a film called ‘Tell Ol’ Bill‘. Rather than a song of desire fulfilled, it’s a song of desolate loneliness and despair.

I know which one I prefer.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Endre’s Cranesbill) – By Meneerke bloem – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7105945

Photo Two (Pencilled Cranesbill) – By Meneerke bloem – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7105945

Photo Three (Cranesbill Seedhead) – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=256121

Photo Four (Les Dawson) – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10627999/Les-Dawson-wrote-secret-romantic-novel-under-name-Maria-Brett-Cooper.html

 

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, Montbretia (also known as crocosmia)  is popping up all over East Finchley. It’s a popular garden plant but it has also naturalised in many parts of the country, particularly the south-west of England where Mum and Dad live. It is a hybrid of two plants: the Valentine Flower or Falling Stars (Crocosmia aurea):

and Pott’s Crocosmia (Crocosmia pottsii).

Both of these are splendid South African flowers, members of the Iridaceae or Iris family, and they were combined by the plant breeder Victor Lemoine in France in 1879. The thing about the montbretia that we’ve grown to know and love is that it quickly spreads to form the clumps that are much appreciated in the garden, but rather less so in the wild places of Dorset or Devon, Anglesey or Sutherland (where it is the fourth commonest alien plant, after sycamore, ground elder and lady’s mantle).  In ‘Alien Plants’ by Clive Stace and Michael Crawley, it’s noted that although the plant can set seed, it spreads more often by means of horizontal rhizomes (underground stems), and that the plant seems to prefer the damp climate of our Atlantic coasts. To see how dense a carpet it can create, have a look at the troll’s head from the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall (below) – the troll’s hair is entirely formed of Montbretia.

Montbretia is also a remarkably resilient plant, which survives being thrown out by gardeners. When I’m in Coldfall Wood, I’m often horrified by the garden waste which is just thrown over the fences of the houses that surround it. I’m sure people don’t realise the harm that can be done by this random ‘fly-tipping’ of plant material. It’s true that the woods are not as ecologically sensitive as some habitats, being full of aliens already, but it would be nice if we could preserve what we still have.

Montbretia seems to come in two colours: the orange and yellow variation that Mum and Dad have, and a much more scarlet version. I always thought that flowers of this colour were largely pollinated by sunbirds and hummingbirds, but a bumblebee was burying itself in the flowers when I was observing earlier this week, so it is clear that insects have learned how to take advantage of the pollen and nectar.

The Latin name Crocosmia might lead you to think that this plant is a member of the crocus family. However, it comes from the Greek words for ‘saffron-odour’ – the dried leaves are said to smell like saffron when immersed in hot water. The name ‘Montbretia’ comes from the name of a French botanist A. F. E. Coquebert de Montbret (1780–1801).

One advantage that Montbretia has over other plants is that it is very tolerant of, and may even prefer,  high rainfall (hence its love of the west coast). Certainly, after a day of unremitting rainfall last week, the plant looked positively cheery.

I expected to find no medicinal uses for Montbretia as we know it -after all, the plant didn’t even exist until 1879. However, Pott’s Crocosmia, one of the ‘parents’, is a Zulu medicinal plant called Undwendweni, used to treat infertility (and thanks to 21stCenturyNaturalist for the information).  Valentine flower (Crocosmia aurea), the other ‘parent’ is used to treat dysentery and diarrhoea.

Valentine flower blooms can be used to produce a yellow dye for use as a food colouring.

In Papua New Guinea, where Montbretia is a recent ‘alien invader’, the crushed leaves are used as a treatment for a head cold by being sniffed like snuff.

I am always surprised at where my research for this blog takes me. Meet HMS Montbretia, a Flower-Class Corvette.

These ships were built for the Allied Forces during World War Two and were used specifically as anti-submarine convoy escorts. All of them were originally named after flowers, so we have HMS Convolvulus and HMS Coriander, among others. I note that those made in other countries were often named something more belligerent – the Canadian navy had ‘Cobalt’ and ‘Drumheller’ for example.

These were relatively slow, lightly-armed ships, intended to be quick to produce. They were mostly built in the smaller shipyards around the country, as the larger ones were already at full capacity.  They were, however, very ‘wet’ boats: you couldn’t get from the front to the back without being drenched, and by 1941 they held twice as many crewmen as they were designed for, with men sleeping on lockers and tabletops. They were also known as ‘the Pekingese of the seas’ because it was said that they would ‘roll in wet grass’ – they wallowed so badly that even experienced seamen succumbed to nausea.It would have been a tedious, wet, uncomfortable assignment, especially as there was no room for fresh food so the sailors subsisted on hard tack and bully beef, just like in the good old days of the Royal Navy. Nonetheless, the convoys largely got through, and the Flower-class corvettes were a major reason why.

HMS Montbretia was built in Paisley in 1940, but in 1941 the Royal Navy sold her to the Norwegian navy. On the 18th November 1942 she was torpedoed by a German U-Boat with the loss of 48 lives.

Last week, I went to see the film ‘Dunkirk’ and so the thought of men lost in the cold, dark sea is especially vivid to me. By a strange coincidence, I had seen ‘The Tempest’ at the Barbican during the same week, and so I would like to leave you with Ariel’s song from the play.

 

Photo Credits

Photo One (Valentine Flower) – By Hectonichus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16866403

Photo Two (Pott’s crocosmia) – By peganum from Small Dole, England (Crocosmia pottsii tall form) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three (Troll’s head) – by Webheathcloseup https://www.flickr.com/photos/76631347@N00/6041267212

Photo Four (HMS Montbretia) – By Royal Navy official photographer, Tomlin, H W (Lt) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Five (The Tempest) – by Plum Leaves (https://www.flickr.com/photos/eoskins/13863575695)

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, you will know by now that I love investigating the most common and overlooked of ‘weeds’, and this week’s subject is what my American friends would call ‘a doozy’. Knotgrass is popping up all over East Finchley at the moment, straggling from between paving stones and emerging from cracked concrete. It has a sprawling, nonchalant habit, tiny flowers and a jointed stem that reminds me a little of bamboo. But as usual, there is more to knotgrass than meets the eye.

Knotgrass is a member of the Polygonaceae, a family that includes redshank, Japanese knotweed and Russian vine . The name ‘Polygonaceae’ derives from the Greek phrase meaning ‘many knees’ – if you look at the stem of knotgrass you can see lots of little ‘joints’ or nodes. I learned with some delight that the Middle English name for this plant is ‘ars-smerte’ – it was once used in a lotion for haemorrhoids, and as many of the plants in this family are hot and peppery, I think we can imagine the reason.

Although knotgrass is a relatively uninteresting plant to the casual observer, I would draw the attention of anyone with a magnifying glass to the flowers and buds, which are rather delightful.

As you will know, I am often flabbergasted when I am researching my ‘weeds’ and today is no exception. In his novel ‘The Man Who Laughs’, Victor Hugo tells of how ‘artificial dwarves’ were created by Spanish child-buyers or Comprachicos. Hugo compares their work of deliberate mutilation to those who create bonsai trees. The Comprachicos stunted the growth of the children   “by anointing babies’ spines with the grease of bats, moles and dormice” and using drugs such as “dwarf elder, knotgrass, and daisy juice”, in order to create tiny people who could be sold as entertainment at court, or as beggars. Although there is some question about how accurate Hugo’s depiction of these practices was, Shakespeare certainly knew that knotgrass had a reputation in this regard. Here is a description of the diminutive Hermia from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

‘Get you gone, dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;‘

And here, in a play by Beaumont and Fletcher, the Coxcomb says that they

‘Want a boy

Kept under for a year on milk and knotgrass‘.

The illustration below is of the Hermia scene described above in  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, painted by none other than William Heath Robinson (1872-1944), the man who created the extraordinary pictures of machines that have led to any ingenious, Wallace and Gromit-esque contraption being described as being ‘Heath Robinson’.

And here, for your delectation, is the William Heath Robinson Naval Cloud Dispeller.

But I digress, as usual.

You might think that knotgrass looks most unappetising, but it has been used as food all over the world (the plant seems to be pretty much universal).In Vietnam, the plant is known as rau đắng, and is used in a hot and sour stew called Canh chua, which looks most delicious.

Several foragers mention that the young leaves can be used in salads, and that the seeds can be milled into flour (knotgrass is closely related to buckwheat). You would need a lot of patience and a clean supply of the plant for either of those activities, however: because of its low-growing habit and preference for paving stones, knotgrass is frequently trampled underfoot and peed upon by dogs, neither of which makes it particularly appetising.

I do wonder if the species name of the plant, aviculare, refers to small birds being partial to the seeds, though. They look just about the right size for goldfinches.

I did learn that the plant has a single taproot which can penetrate to nearly four feet, which makes it very drought-resistant, another desirable attribute in an exposed city plant. It is also said to be rich in zinc.

In Turkey, the plant is known as Madimak, and here is a recipe from the Turkish Yummies website

Generally, knotgrass has been seen as a famine food, something to get people through when nothing else was available. It is, however, seen as food by many insects, including the bloodwing moth, whose caterpillar tries to camouflage itself as a thorny twig.

As well as being used for piles, knotgrass has been used as a diuretic, and for the treatment of urinary tract infections. It is an antihelminthic (I love this word – it means that it can be used to expel parasitic worms), and has been used to break down mucus when people have lung and throat infections.

You might think that such a small and humble plant would not have made much of an impact on poets (except for its child-shrinking abilities, of course). But here is Keats, in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:’

 

And here is Oliver Wendell Holmes from his poem ‘The Exile’s Secret’

Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
Its hearthstone, shaded with the bistre stain
A century’s showery torrents wash in vain;
Its starving orchard, where the thistle blows
And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
Its knot-grass, plantain,–all the social weeds,
Man’s mute companions, following where he leads;
Its dwarfed, pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
Its woodbine, creeping where it used to climb;
Its roses, breathing of the olden time;
All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
As life’s thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
Save home’s last wrecks,–the cellar and the well?

‘Man’s mute companions’, indeed. But I sometimes wonder if they would still speak to us, as they used to, if we paid them more attention.

 

Photo Credits

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

Photo Two (Vietnamese hotpot) – By Jason Hutchens – Flickr: Canh Chua, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2500892

Photo Three (knotgrass seed) – By Stefan.lefnaer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53572135

Photo Four (Bloodwing caterpillar) – By Bj.schoenmakers – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53374298

Photo Five (Adult bloodwing) – By Marcello Consolo at https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelloconsolo/29141640432/

Photo Six (Knotgrass) – By Dalgial – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7036011

 

 

 

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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