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, some plants seem much too exotic for a damp north London wood, and so finding tutsan growing amidst the pendulous sedge is always a real surprise. In spite of appearances, tutsan is a native plant, though the fact that lots of people grow it as a garden plant can cause much confusion. It is normally a plant of woods in the west of England but has certainly become established in Coldfall Wood, where it starts to flower  a month or so after the Marsh Marigold has finished.

.The berries of tutsan start off like little apples, but over time they become black, and are much favoured by birds. There is some debate about whether the fruit is poisonous to humans, or simply inedible. The fuzzy flowers remind me of a close relative, the Rose of Sharon (Hypericum calycinum) which has a positive firework display of stamens, and which is another popular garden plant.

The name ‘Tutsan’ is thought to come from the French phrase toute saine, which literally means ‘all-healthy’. This is thought to be a reference to its healing powers: Culpeper considered it good for sciatica and gout, and to aid the healing of burns, with the leaves being used for all of these purposes. He also thought it good for the healing of wounds:the plant

“stays all the bleedings of wounds, if either the green herb be bruised, or the powder of the dry be applied thereto”.

The Portuguese also used it as a diuretic, and as a treatment for jaundice.

The antiseptic properties of the leaves were also used as a cheese preservative: according to the author of ‘The Domestic Encyclopedia’ (1802), A.F.M. Willich, tutsan leaves

‘have from experience been found to possess considerable antiseptic properties. They ought, however, to be employed only when moderately dry, in which state they should be placed upon, or at the sides of the cheese, in an airy situation.”

Other names include Sweet Amber (for the pretty yellow flowers) and, in Wales, Dail y Beiblau, or Bible Leaves, as the sweet-smelling leaves were used as bookmarks in the Bible that every household would have.

Richard Mabey describes the dried leaves as having ‘an evocative, fugitive scent, reminiscent of cigar boxes and candied fruit’ (Flora Britannica), and says that they were being used as Bible markers in parts of Somerset up to the Second World War.

As it is so well-behaved in its native range, I was surprised to find that, in Australia and New Zealand, Tutsan is considered a noxious weed. I suppose that, as is so often the case, a plant that has lots of creatures to munch upon it at home will go a bit berserk when it isn’t to the taste of woodland marsupials and forest birds. In New Zealand a moth and a small beetle have been approved as agents of biological control: the caterpillars of the moth, a British native ( Lathronympha strigana), feeds on the leaves of all Hypericum species, so hopefully there aren’t any in New Zealand that the country wants to preserve.

The beetle is a member of the Chrysolina genus, which also includes the lovely but voracious rosemary beetle, though from the pictures on the website, the species chosen is a rather rotund little black chap, whose larvae make short work of the berries. To see why such controls might be needed, have a look at the photos from the New Zealand Environmental Protection Agency here. The damper climate of New Zealand seems to have enabled tutsan to move out of the forests and onto the hillsides, where it has morphed into a triffid.

I was able to find several mentions of tutsan as a healing plant in literature. The Tudor poet Michael Drayton (1563 – 1631) includes the plant amongst a positively stellar cast of medicinal plants in his celebration of the British Isles, The Poly-Olbion. No, I’d never heard of it either, but Samuel Johnson liked it enough to include it in a collection of early poets. Here, our hero is gathering herbs to cure a migraine (megrim):

And in some open place that to the sun doth lie,

He fumitory gets, and eye-bright for the eye;

The yarrow, wherewithal he stops the wound-made gore;

The healing tutsan then, and plantane for a sore

And hard by them again he holy vervaine finds

Which he about his head that has the megrim binds.

In some ways, tutsan seems to me to be a plant that we’ve forgotten about. We’ve heard of yarrow and eye-bright, plantain and vervaine (verbena) but I bet that not in one in a hundred could identify wild tutsan (including me before I started this blog). And yet, another of its names is ‘balm of the wounded warrior’, and there is a legend that the berries sprang from the blood of dead Vikings. Maybe it’s time that we paid it a bit more attention.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Rose of Sharon) – By JJ Harrison (jjharrison89@facebook.com) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5523268

Photo Two (Flowers and Berries) – By Nova – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2576968

Photo Three (Flowers, berries, raindrops) – By Eric Hunt (https://www.flickr.com/photos/39312862@N00/38762639/)

Photo Four (Moth) – By Hectonichus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20886829

Photo Five (Berries) – ceridwen [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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 mysterious plant has popped up in my East Finchley garden, in two locations. Both are directly under a bird feeder. At first I was a little puzzled, as I only ever feed my birds sunflower seeds, but then it occurred to me that ‘my’ birds are probably a little more promiscuous in their feeding habits than I give them credit for. Because this delightful blue flower is flax, or linseed, and is a popular ingredient in many seed mixes. Plus, it can obviously survive a journey through a bird’s digestive tract.

I was lucky to get some photographs of the plant this morning, because by this afternoon the petals on all of these flowers had dropped off, something that Richard Mabey notes in Flora Britannica. We have two native flax plants: the delightfully named fairy flax (Linum catharticum) and pale flax (Linum bienne), but this one is an ancient introduction which is known only as a cultivated plant, and seems to have arrived in the UK in the middle ages. The species name ‘usitatissimum’ means ‘really, really, really useful’, and so it is, because the plant not only produces the fibre needed for linen, but its seeds are linseeds, used not just for bird food but also for a wide variety of human requirements.

Firstly, the linen link. Humans appear to have been using flax to produce cloth since the paleolithic age 30,000 years ago. The ancient Egyptians considered the plant a symbol of purity, and priests wore garments woven from the fibre. Mummies were preserved in linen cloth. Roman ships had billowing sails made from flax. In later years, Flanders became the centre of linen production, and it pre-dated cotton as the most important fibre crop in North American for many years. However, by the twentieth century 90% of all linen production came from northern Russia, as cotton production became cheaper. Artificial fibres further put a dent in the linen market.

The past ubiquity of the material is marked in English by the way that we used phrases like ‘bed-linen’, even though these days our sheets are more likely to be made of cotton.

However, as I sit here on a Sunday afternoon typing away, I am wearing a linen dress. In spite of the fact that it gets rather crumpled, the fibre is one of the most comfortable for hot summer weather, certainly much preferable to the various man-made options.  I love that it breathes, especially important when you are of a ‘certain age’ and a little prone to ‘feeling the heat’.

When I look at flax, my first question is where the blooming hell does the fabric come from? This is not a plant that wears its usefulness obviously. However, a little research tells me that the fibre comes from the bast, which is a layer just below the surface of the stem. The fibre apparently looks just like blonde hair (hence ‘flaxen-haired’). It is stronger than cotton fibre, but less elastic. The finest threads can be used to make lace or damask, or even (the height of luxury) linen sheets. Coarser grades can make rope or canvas. The fibre itself can be turned into paper for banknotes, cigarette papers or even teabags.

Flax is harvested in a brief window of time when it begins to turn yellow. Too early, and the seed and fibre are underdeveloped: too late and the fibre begins to degrade.

The plant is pulled up  by the roots (it’s an annual crop anyhow) and left to dry, before going through a series of processes. Retting involves rotting away the unwanted parts of the stem so that the fibre can be extracted. You can do this by throwing the flax into a pond, but this produces relatively low quality results and, as anyone who has produced comfrey or nettle fertilizer by this method can attest, the smell is appalling. The very finest quality fibre is produced by leaving the flax in a field and allowing the dew to gradually rot away the unwanted parts.

The fibre then needs to be separated from the rest of the plant. I  love that one of these processes is called ‘heckling’, and involves combing the stems with ‘heckling combs’ which look rather more like instruments of torture.

The flax seeds, or linseeds, are having something of a renaissance as a health food at the moment, especially as a source of omega -3, 6 and 9 acids, B vitamins and minerals. They are  high in protein, and are said to be beneficial for lowering cholesterol. They are also full of fibre, although eating too many can apparently be a source of bowel obstruction, so don’t go making any linseed pasties, people. If you would like the health benefits of flax seeds without any danger of toilet troubles, you can also buy flax seed oil, which may work rather better in a smoothie. There can be little doubt of its nutritional value, and so there is no surprise that a company which has crowdfunded to finance a new meal replacement product would have included it as part of its formulation.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Soylent.

Much like Slimfast, Soylent is intended to be a meal replacement for slimmers, but unlike Slimfast it is intended for hipsters and trendy folk. The liquid has had various formulations that have included algal oil and algal flour in addition to flax seed oil and canola. There have been various reports of ‘gas adaptation problems’ and gastrointestinal upsets, but the key problem appears to have been the taste. Here are some reviews:

“like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass”

“my mouth tastes hot and like old cheese”

“homemade nontoxic Play-Doh”

However, my chief worry (she says while jumping up and down) is this: did no one ever see the science fiction film Soylent Green? In which the meal replacement that everyone ate was made from REAL DEAD PEOPLE? Either the manufacturers didn’t know what the food in Soylent Green was made from, or it’s irony gone Too Far.

But, as usual, I digress. Here is an orange cranberry flaxseed muffin to take the taste away.

Linseed oil has also been used in a wide variety of products and manufacturing processes. It dries slowly, is not brittle once it has dried, and is very hydrophobic. It’s been included in artists’ paints, is a key ingredient of putty, and is a beautiful treatment for wood, allowing the grain to shine through. It is used to season a cricket bat, and to enhance the beauty of a lute.

Furthermore, it’s a key ingredient in linoleum. Who knew? I suppose the name should have given it away. Linseed oil is used to bind the various materials (such as cork chippings or wood dust) that make up the flooring material. When I was growing up, every kitchen and bathroom in a working-class London home was floored with ‘lino’ – it was water-resistant, cheerful, easy to clean and relatively hard-wearing. In the 1970’s it was largely replaced with PVC floor-covering, but is making a comeback because it is more environmentally friendly.

Now, to revert to the description above of preparing flax so the fibre can be removed, and linen woven. Irish linen is the best in the world, and so there is no surprise in my mind that one of Ireland’s greatest poets, Seamus Heaney, has a poem about the process of retting the plant, and about so much else too. I hope that you enjoy it.

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Credits

Photo One (Heckling comb) – By Kozuch – Own work (Own photo), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8040921

Photo Two (Muffin) – http://www.yogurtland.com/category/dessert/cakes/page/4/

Poem by Seamus Heaney – http://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/death-of-a-naturalist-seamus-heaney-poem/

All other blog content free to use and share, but please 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…..

Dear Readers, I’ve been writing the Wednesday Weed for more than three years now and I’m starting to notice trends and patterns.In East Finchley, and in north London generally,there has been a mass breakout of the delicate Welsh poppy (Meconopsis cambrica), and I could not be happier. This butter-yellow flower is a favourite with pollinators such as hoverflies, and is rather less of a bruiser than the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) that was spotted round the corner in 2015.

As a truly ‘wild’ plant, Welsh poppy is designated as Nationally Scarce, and in Great Britain is found only in shaded rocky places in the hills of Wales, South West England and Ireland. However, it is a regular garden escapee, and seems to prefer the crevices at the bottom of walls that remind it of its wild habitat. It is often spotted with greater celandine and yellow corydalis in these parts – what is it about yellow flowered plants that make them such adventurous ‘weeds’ I wonder?

You might have noticed that the Welsh poppy is a member of the Meconopsis, the same genus as the Himalayan blue poppy, which also loves rocky places. There is some debate about this, as the Welsh poppy is the only member of the group that lives outside of the Himalayas. No doubt the botanists will continue to debate this one for some time to come. The word ‘Meconopsis’ means ‘like a poppy’ from the Greek Mekon (poppy) and opsis (like). And here is a blue poppy, so that you can compare and contrast. My fellow blogger Squirrelbasket has written a great post about the naming of poppies here, well worth a read.

Although it doesn’t just grow in Wales, the Welsh poppy is very much associated with the country, and it is the emblem of Plaid Cymru, though at first glance you might mistake it for that other flower that is so much part of Welsh culture and heritage, the daffodil. One piece of folklore about the plant is that it doesn’t flourish away from Welsh soil. You might think that the Welsh poppies popping up all over East Finchley give the lie to this belief, but actually, studies have shown that these plants descend from ancestors from the Pyrenees, so perhaps there’s something to it after all.

I spent some time looking for medicinal uses for this plant. In ‘A Druid’s Handbook’, Jon G. Hughes reports that the Welsh name for this poppy is llsiau cwsg, or herb of sleep. However, it was used externally for skin complaints, as it was believed to be poisonous. All poppies are toxic to some extent, but I suspect you’d have to really work at it to do yourself a damage with a Welsh poppy.

I have also been doing some investigation into the palatability of Welsh poppies – after all, poppyseeds are a common ingredient in many cuisines. There is a wonderful blog by Tortoiselady who occasionally feeds the plant to her reptiles, but I have not found any mention of human uses. Tortoiselady also has very useful information on hedgehogs and birds, and she is definitely a person after my own heart. At the moment the garden is more of a sanctuary for damaged and unwanted weeds, plus frogs and fledgling starlings. I wonder if I could start a frog sanctuary? There must be some poor, elderly frogs in need of a retirement home.

One of these days I fully intend to create a bigger animal sanctuary for all kinds of damaged and unwanted creatures, but please don’t mention this to my husband. I haven’t broken the news to him yet.

I should point out that Welsh poppy comes in a rather attractive apricot colour too.

As you know, I love to finish off with a relevant poem. This one, by Mavis Gulliver, made me cry. I am reluctant to just cut and paste the work of living poets because, after all, this is how they earn their living, and I’m sure it’s also in breach of copyright. So please click here to read about how plants can evoke emotion, and memory. The poem is called ‘Breaking Dormancy’.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Blue Poppy) – By Photo by and (c)2008 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man). Co-attribution must be given to the Chanticleer Garden. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3525054

Photo Two(Plaid Cymru logo) – By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31867052

Photo Three (Orange poppy) – By Svdmolen (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

All other blog content free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute, 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…..

Dear Readers, following last week’s investigation of one of the most delicious of plants, I am turning my attention to laburnum (sometimes known as golden chain) which has a reputation as one of the most poisonous. This small tree originally came from southern and central Europe, but was introduced to the UK by 1596. This particular tree was found in the scrubby woodland between the builders’ merchant and Highgate Wood, where it seemed to be doing very well.

Firstly, let’s talk about that dangerous reputation. All parts of the laburnum contain a poisonous alkaloid called cystisine, which is dangerous to humans, horses and cattle. The tree belongs to the Fabaceae, or pea family, and many of the incidents of poisoning occur when children mistake the fresh seedpods for peas. However, on The Poison Garden website, the author can find no accounts of child fatalities from ingesting the seeds during the last century. A 1979 study found 3000 hospital admissions, but this was an estimate extrapolated from cases in the north west of the UK, and the author thought that many of the admissions were because the plant was thought to be dangerous, rather than because of symptoms. There are many cases of children eating the plant, but it seems that generally they recover without medical intervention. One documented fatality, in 2009, involved a 20 year-old man who drank tea made with laburnum leaves and died as a result of cytisine poisoning. However, as John Robertson points out, this rather beautiful tree has suffered out of all proportion to documented cases of poisoning, with parents and grandparents cutting down laburnum trees in their gardens and ignoring much more dangerous plants.

It should be noted that hares and rabbits reputedly find the bark to be a delicacy.

The wood of laburnum has been used for making musical instruments and furniture, and was once used for making bows. The wood from old laburnum trees was known as ‘false ebony’ because it was so dark. These days, it is sometimes used to make garden furniture and barrel hoops. Below, however, is a rather more interesting use of laburnum wood: two spray cans, presumably for creating a higher class of graffiti. The grain of the wood is very beautiful. However, do not use the wood for scratching posts for your cats, as the filings may be ingested during grooming, with unfortunate results, and there is some evidence that exposure to the sawdust can cause ‘constitutional symptoms’ (feeling generally under the weather).

There are Laburnum Avenues and Laburnum Roads all over the western world, and indeed even some Laburnum Medical Centres, and in spite of its poisonous nature, it has been used in medications for asthma and whooping cough. Cytisine is also the active ingredient in a smoking cessation drug called Tabex, developed in Bulgaria, and found to be three times more effective than a placebo in helping people to give up. The website for the drug emphasises that cytisine is very close, structurally, to nicotine, but is much weaker, and cites this as the reason for its ‘success’. However, as John Robertson points out on The Poison Garden, this still means that only 31 out of the 370 trial subjects managed to give up, so maybe the best thing to do is not to start smoking in the first place (if you have a Tardis so you can go back in time and knock that Woodbine out of your own mouth).

Dreaming of a laburnum in bloom is said to mean that adversity can be overcome with intelligent effort (if you can muster up such a thing), and in the language of flowers it means forgotten,  pensive beauty. It is the birthday flower for 8th January, though I have no idea how someone decides these things, as any self-respecting laburnum would be sound asleep at this point of the year.

The tree is said to be the influence for Laurelin, the golden tree of J.R.R. Tolkein’s late-published work ‘The Silmarillion’. Although I have read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I would direct the eager reader to the much less read Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake, which I personally much preferred. This has nothing at all to do with laburnum, and everything to do with my wanting to suggest an interesting read for those of you inclined towards Gothic fantasy (which I realise may be a small subset of my readership) .

For all its beauty the laburnum is a little tree, on a domestic scale, one that fits into many back gardens. I rather like this poem by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), sentimental as it is: ‘my spirit flew in feathers then’ is a lovely line, and there is, of course, a laburnum.

 

Photo Credits

Photo One (Laburnum spray cans)  – https://www.flickr.com/photos/observatoryleak/7656772460

All blog content 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…..

Dear Readers, I first discovered wild strawberry when I was a young woman, fresh out of university. I was doing some volunteer work on a city farm in Dundee, Scotland. One of my duties was to take the goats for a walk (as you do) – we had two milking goats, Beatrice, a white toggenburg with distinctive tassels under her chin and Shirley, an anglo-nubian with a bellow like a dying walrus. Both of them had two kids, and so we had a little herd of six. Every day, I took them to a piece of wasteland a hundred yards from the farm, and sat on a pile of masonry while the mothers grazed, and the babies played ‘I’m the king of the castle’. Passersby on the way to the bus station would sometimes stop to survey the scene, and on one occasion a small boy asked me what kind of dogs they were, but generally all was peaceful except for the hum of bees and the occasional groan from Shirley. Sometimes, I would almost doze off, but Beatrice had a habit of resting her forehead against my leg and sighing, as if motherhood was too much, so it wasn’t usually for long. And for sustenance, I had the wild strawberries that grew everywhere. I would even fight the goats for them. The intense flavour of these tiny fruits was concentrated berry sweetness, much finer than anything that I ever grew or bought from a shop. This was a complicated time in life, when I really had no idea at all what I was doing, and yet I remember those summer afternoons with great fondness. The sense of possibility, of choice, was something that I wouldn’t experience again until I was in my fifties.

I found the plant twice today, once growing in the wall of the Parkland Walk at Muswell Hill, a disused railway line turned into a nature reserve, and once in the unadopted road here in East Finchley. I suspect that St Pancras and Islington Cemetery will be full of it, too. This is not an ancestor of our garden strawberry, but a species in its own right, and a native of the UK and most of the Northern Hemisphere. Also known as the Alpine Strawberry, the fruit is much prized in other parts of Europe: the Swedes thread the individual fruits onto grass stalks because they are so delicate. I should add here that Ingmar Bergman’s film, called ‘Wild Strawberries’ in English, has a title that translates as ‘wild strawberry patch’ in Swedish, which can mean ‘an underrated gem of a place, often with sentimental or personal value’ according to that fount of knowledge, Wikipedia. I’m glad that I’m not the only person for whom the sight of wild strawberries rekindles memories of times past.

You might expect such tasty fruit to be popular with creatures besides ourselves, and you would be right: deer and all manner of birds love the fruit. William Morris was inspired to create his pattern ‘ The Strawberry Thief’ after seeing a thrush take one from the garden.

For a more realistic depiction of the fruit, we can turn to the still lives of the Dutch Golden Age by artists such as Adriaen Coorte. The ones in the picture below look delicious enough to pluck from the frame and munch right away.

The name ‘strawberry’ comes not from the straw which is sometimes placed under the ripening berries of domestic fruits, but from an old past participle of the verb ‘to strew’, describing how the plant spreads itself across the ground by runners. The website ‘A Modern Herbal’ describes many of the plant’s medicinal uses: the leaves were mostly used for conditions such as gout, but the fruit is said to be useful for whitening the teeth (the juice must remain on the teeth for five minutes, and then be washed off with water to which a pinch of bicarbonate of soda has been added). Cut strawberries rubbed all over the skin will help if, like me while I was in Canada, you are unexpectedly afflicted with mild sunburn. This occurred on one of only two bright sunny days that we experienced in two and a half weeks: the rest of the time, you were more likely to need a remedy for rust, so torrential and persistent was the down pour.

The plant has a lively and varied folklore associated with it. In Norse mythology, the goddess Freya  smuggled dead children into her ‘hall’ wrapped in wild strawberry leaves. In Roman mythology, it is associated with Venus. For Christians, it was the plant of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, with the three-part leaves representing the Trinity. However, its sweetness and sultry perfume were thought also to be a source of temptation, as seen in several parts of Hieronymous Bosch’s painting ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. painted between 1495 and 1505. The left hand panel of this work shows the Garden of Eden, and the right hand panel shows the  Last Judgement. In the central panel, naked humans are shown enjoying largely innocent pleasures, including riding on enormous fish-submarines, and wrestling with gigantic strawberries. This is a work of extraordinary imagination and exuberance, and has been open to interpretation of different kinds from the beginning. Just recently, some scholars have detected a note of irony in his work, but I do wonder if this is just us inflicting our own world view on someone who lived almost 800 years ago.

It will not surprise you to learn that wild strawberries have inspired a number of poets. One of them is the cartoonist and children’s author Shel Silverstein (1930 -1999), whose poem ‘Wild Strawberries’ is a great example of taking an idea and running with it.

Are Wild Strawberries really wild?
Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?
Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam?
Could they ever relax in a steam heated home?
Can they be trained to not growl at the guests?
Will a litterbox work or would they leave a mess?
Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows,
Or maybe a Muleberry pulling the plows,
Or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse,
Or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house,
And though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly,
Can you ever feel that you trust them completely?
Or should we make a pet out of something less scary,
Like the Domestic Prune, or the Imported Cherry,
Anyhow, you’ve been warned and I will not be blamed
If your Wild Strawberry cannot be tamed.

However, for a more grown-up poem about the plant,  I would like to honour Helen Dunmore an author better known for her novels but a very gifted poet . I have read many of her books, but one of my favourites is ‘The Siege’, about the 1941-1944 siege of Leningrad. It’s an agonising read, but one of those books that linger in the memory long after they’ve been read. I was deeply sad to learn that the author has terminal cancer, and has written a very considered and moving piece about it here. One of her great strengths as a writer is her use of sensory impressions to draw us in. I am in awe of how she does this. The poem is copyright, but do have a look here . You won’t be disappointed.

Photo Credits

Photo One(Wild Strawberry fruit) – By Jörg Hempel, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41218044

Photo Two (The Strawberry Thief) – By The original uploader was VAwebteam at English Wikipedia [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

Photos of paintings by Adriaen Coorte and Hieronymous Bosch in the public domain.

Credit to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica for some of the information in this week’s blog.

Blog content free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!