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, last week I was sitting half-hidden behind a gravestone trying to get some photos of the foxes when I saw two of them lope off along a grassy path between the tombstones. I decided to follow them, but of course they had disappeared by the time I’d gotten myself together – they are most elusive for such large animals, and I often sense them watching me with some satisfaction as I lumber past. However, what I did spot was a little patch of this member of the clover family, the intriguingly-named black medick. The citrus-coloured flowers remind me of lemon sherbet.

You might think that the name ‘Medick’ has some reference to the plant’s possible medicinal applications, but apparently not. The plant is closely related to alfalfa, and both are thought to have come from Media, a northern Iranian kingdom mentioned by Herodotus, and now largely lost in antiquity. The word ‘Black’ probably refers to the colour of the seeds.

Black medick is a common native plant, found in all parts of the country except for the north and west of Scotland. It can also be found throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa, and has even made its way to many islands, such as Taiwan and Madeira. It can survive at an altitude of up to 1800 metres, and is cold resistant.  It is a member of the pea and vetch family, and as such it helps to fix nitrogen in the soil, and is a source of nectar for honey, and a useful fodder plant. I love the way that the flowerheads look like complex origami, with each individual flower having that distinctive ‘vetch-y’ look.  It is certainly a plant that repays close inspection.

This little plant, with its trifoliate leaves, is sometimes seen as the original shamrock of St Patrick , though these days this honour is more often passed to the larger, showier white or red clover. The finding of a four-leaved clover is considered especially lucky, as those of us who have scoured a meadow looking for such a thing as children will remember. I have always wondered why a four-leaved clover was seen as such a lucky thing (apart from its rarity, of course), and have read two explanations on the Flora of Castle Warden website. One is that a four-leaved clover grows where a mare has dropped her first foal. The other is that the four leaves stand for faith, hope, love and luck.

Whatever the explanation is, you can identify black medick even when it isn’t in flower by the tiny claw-like projections (mucro) at the centre of each leaf.

Although black medick is a useful plant for cows and sheep, it has a rather convoluted history when it comes to its ingestion by people. There are some worries that it might be problematic for pregnant women, or for anyone who is taking blood-thinners (Warfarin or Coumadin), or for children. However, in Europe the leaves have been eaten as a pot herb, and in North America the seeds have been used to make a kind of flower. The ever-useful Eat the Weeds website has a full run-down on the pros and cons of making your supper from black medick, but on balance I would incline towards leaving it for the bees and the other critters.

Black medick is one of the plants represented in Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies series, and although they are a little whimsical for my taste ( I prefer to think of fairy folk as being more mischievous and wild than the ones depicted here), I love how accurately the plants are represented (the flowers, leaves and seedcases are spot-on). I am also impressed by the butterfly wings on the fairies, which are fair representations of those of a female Large White.

I have used quite a lot of other people’s photos in my post this week, because there has been a lot of strimming and grass-cutting in the cemetery. When I walked the fox-path again, I found myself ankle-deep in dried grass, desiccated buttercup flowers and the crumpled faces of germander speedwell. The black medick is gone, for now. But it’s the cutting of these areas that keeps their diversity, and I have every hope that some plants will rebound, while others will have already set seed. For every area that has been cut, another is re-growing. The starlings and blackbirds are tossing the hay aside in their search for insects, and the bees are moving on to the red clover just flowering in the less tended areas. And me? I’m just thinking that I should not assume that anything will be here forever.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By S. Rae (https://www.flickr.com/photos/35142635@N05/15605449924)

Photo Two – By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2728945

Photo Three – By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2728955

Photo Four – By Sofi (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sofi01/4882620711)

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

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, who would have thought that this delicate, pale-rose flower is a member of the Cabbage family, like the hairy bitter-cress that we looked at a few weeks ago? Yet, a close look at the four-petalled flowers in their typical cross (crucifer) shape is enough to give us a clue. I found these plants in several of the damper places in the cemetery, where they seem to have popped up like meerkats. Often, they are combined with speedwell and buttercups, and the colours make me catch my breath. I wish I could meet every one of you for a wildflower walk among the tombstones at the moment, there is a wonder around every corner.

Lady’s smock is a native plant and has many alternative names: cuckooflower (probably because it flowers at the same time as the return of the cuckoo), fairy flower and milkmaids. The petals of the buds are resemble a skirt, and so make it easier to see where the ‘smock’ part of the name might have come from. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey suggests that there might also be a more lascivious connotation to the word, with about the same meaning as ‘a bit of skirt’, and wonders if there might be a reference to what went on in the spring meadows.

However, Lady’s Smock also, confusingly, has an association with the Virgin Mary, and yet another alternative name is ‘Our Lady’s Smock’. This refers to the seamless white robe that Mary made for Jesus, and which was worn by him on Good Friday. It fascinates me how the bawdy references to a plant at one point in its history can be overlaid with biblical symbolism later, but how the two meanings often continue, side by side.

The name ‘fairy flower’ probably came from the belief that the plant was sacred to the fairies, and so was unlucky if brought indoors. It was not included in May Day garlands for the same reason. It was also believed that picking the plant could create thunderstorms, and might attract adders. The real beneficiary of leaving the plant alone, though, is the orange-tip butterfly, who prefers lady’s smock and garlic mustard to any other plants. If you look closely at this time of year, you might be able to spot the caterpillars, though they are very well camouflaged.

Like most members of the Brassica family, Lady’s Smock has  been used as food – the leaves are said to have a strong peppery flavour , and in fact the Latin name ‘cardamine’ refers to Water cress, which has a similar taste. The Badger Bushcraft website  uses Lady’s Smock  to make a fiery condiment. On the ‘Eat the Weeds’ website, the leaves are combined with another recent favourite, three-cornered garlic, to make a side salad. Most of the brassicas seem to have some food value, much as their big domesticated cousins do. In fact, I suspect that these wild plants might have more concentrated goodness in them, having not been ‘messed about with’ for added sweetness or for a longer shelf life. Indeed, it has been reported that the leaves of lady’s smock have five times the vitamin C content of a lemon.

Medicinally, lady’s smock has a long history of use for convulsions and epilepsy, and also has an association with the treatment of gynecological problems. Culpeper recommends using the plant, in its fresh state, for gallstones, scurvy and upset stomachs. On the Plant Lives website, Sue Eland relates how a powder was created by roasting the plant on a pewter dish. This powder was then kept in bottles which must have leather, rather than cork, stoppers, for reasons that are lost in antiquity.

As you might expect, a plant that flowers in the spring and which has been native to these islands for thousands of years has been honoured in a fair amount of poetry. Shakespeare features it in ‘Love’s Labours Lost:

‘When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady’s smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men, for thus sings he: ‘Cuckoo,
Cuckoo, cuckoo’! Oh word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear’.

This verse refers to the way that the cuckoo was thought to signal that a husband had been betrayed (cuckolded) by his wife, and it seems that this innocent little flower has a long tradition of being associated with infidelity: in ‘The Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry’, edited by Lucy Hooper, including the plant in a bouquet is said to be an indication of ‘paternal error’. What with all this business about smocks and meadows it all feels decidedly like one of those paintings of peasants being unruly by Pieter Brueghel.

This is my third year of writing ‘The Wednesday Weed’ every week, and it has now reached the point where, as I walk through the cemetery, I am seeing old floral friends come into flower and wane. The lesser celandine is almost finished now, the bluebells have grey husks where their flowers once were, but the red campion is in full flower, and the hogweed is waiting for its moment just as the cow parsley is at its greatest glory. The rhythm of the seasons is both subtle and obvious, but walking the shady lanes and verdant grasslands here has brought it home to me that I need to take that photograph, smell that blossom, listen to that chiff-chaff, right now, because in a few weeks it will be gone. Carpe diem indeed.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By No machine-readable author provided. Svdmolen assumed (based on copyright claims). [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 Two – By H. Krisp (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

All other photographs copyright Vivienne Palmer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 wanted to feature the dog violet as a Wednesday Weed before it finishes flowering. There is a fine bed of it in the cemetery, stretching back between the trees for about 30 metres, and it gives the whole area a purple-blue haze.

Identifying violas to the species level is actually very difficult, but I have gone along with this being Common Dog Violet because, as its name suggests, it is our commonest species, and because several diagnostic features are right: for example, the ‘spur’ at the back of the flower is lighter than the petals in this species, and the lines on the lower petal, the ‘nectar guides’, are very pronounced. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there were thought to be over forty species and subspecies of violets, including many hybrids, but in his New Flora of the British Isles, the inimitable botanist Clive Stace has trimmed it back to twenty eight species, sub-species and hybrids.

What a delicate, pretty flower this is. Often it peeps out from below a hedgerow and if you weren’t paying attention it would be easy to miss it. It is a native plant, and has been a feature of our poetry for centuries. Perhaps the most famous mention of the violet is in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’:

‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight:
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.’

And I must admit that I felt tempted to have a little doze in the cemetery when I spotted the violets, the sun was so warm and the buzzing of bees so soporific. But artists have also identified something melancholy about the violet, maybe because of its perceived shyness, and its brief flowering period. My favourite Shakespeare violet quote is  from Hamlet, when Ophelia, driven mad by our hero, says to the assembled, horrified company that:

‘I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.’

Although I am not a great lover of Wordsworth’s poetry (too many weeks spent studying ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ for my A Levels I fear), I do find his poem ‘The Lost Love’ very moving. I think we can all identify with the final lines.

‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove:
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the eye!-
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!’

Many of the folkloric associations of the violet have to do with its assumed modesty. One of the goddess Diana’s nymph companions was changed into a violet to protect her from being ravished by Apollo. In the Victorian ‘language of flowers’ they represent delicacy in love. It is also said that violets bloomed wherever Orpheus put down his lute.

So, why ‘dog’ violet? It is thought that this is to distinguish this plant from the perfumed ‘sweet violet’ (Viola odorata), which I have not yet managed to find. It is this scented species which has been used in perfume-making since medieval times, and I well remember that when we used to holiday in Devon as children, every gift shop had a heady aroma of ‘Devon Violets’ perfume, which was inclined to give my mother a migraine. There were also violet-flavoured sweets, and a violet liquer (which was a violent violet colour) called ‘Parfait Amour’. These days, I limit myself to a box of rose and violet creme chocolates at Christmas, though I can scoff the lot in under an hour if left alone with them.

Many of the medicinal uses of violets relate to the Sweet Violet, but according to The Modern Herbal website, Culpeper refers to the leaves of all species as being useful in a poultice for inflammation, and to relieve ‘pains in the head through lack of sleep’. An infusion of the flowers and leaves is said to assist with the symptoms of throat complaints, including cancer.  The root is said to be extremely emetic and purgative. Mixing thirty-six violet leaves with melted lard is said to produce an ointment which can be used for swollen neck glands.

If violets are to be used for flavouring then Sweet Violet will be used, but the flowers of Common Dog Violet can be used to pretty-up salads, or, crystallised with egg white and sugar, to adorn cakes. I’m not sure if the cake below quite sums up the delicate effects that I’m sure can be achieved but hey, I’d eat it.

As we might expect, the violet has also been part of the work of many artists. It is included in the garden of ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ tapestry, made in Flanders in the sixteenth century. Here, it is symbolising modesty, as usual.

By the time of Manet, it was being used for its colour and form rather than for its symbolic value. In the picture below, I love the juxtaposition of the flowers against the red fan, and the lavender-edged writing paper. I also enjoy the way that the flowers are seen here against the darkness. I remember that Napoleon scattered Josephine’s coffin with the flowers of violets.

And, to link back to the association of violets with death and sorrow, have a look at this Magritte picture, titled ‘La Grande Guerre’ (‘The Great War’), from the Magritte Gallery The face of the woman is replaced by a posy of violets, such as one might throw onto a coffin.

How intent we are on attaching symbolic value to flowers, which are actually the fierce face of a plant’s determination to reproduce itself. And how interesting that a violet can be a symbol of melancholy, of modesty, and of the dreaminess of a summer evening, all at the same time.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Lsalvay – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25641207

All other photographs copyright Vivienne Palmer

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, every so often a plant that I haven’t noticed before seems to be popping up absolutely everywhere, and this is the case with three-cornered garlic (also known as three-cornered leek). I first noticed it in the cemetery, where it was growing happily on the graves alongside the artificial roses, but then I saw it popping up along the edge of a wall by All Saints’ Church, and growing in some of the gardens in the County Roads here in East Finchley. It’s easy to miss because it looks rather like a white bluebell, but the giveaway is the stem, which is sharply triangular, like a long green Toblerone bar. The leaves have a faint but unmistakable onion/garlic flavour, as you would expect from an allium and if you turn them over, they have a deep ridge in the centre, which some people compare to the keel of a ship. Finally, the flowers have a fine green stripe, which is another indicator for the species.

Three-cornered garlic was introduced from the Mediterranean basin by 1759, and has been naturalising ever since, especially in the south-west. It is described in many places as ‘invasive’, and certainly it appears to take off like a rocket when in the right position. But it has numerous good qualities.  As you might expect of a plant with a garlicky taste, it can be used for a wide variety of culinary purposes . On his ‘Eat The Weeds’ website, Robin Harford has a recipe for Wild Greens with Spiced Tahini Rice, which includes not only three-cornered garlic but also ground elder and herb bennet, both of which can be a right royal pain in the backside if they get a grip in the garden. If this doesn’t appeal, you can knock up some Three-cornered Garlic Hummus. And finally (and this would be perfect because the Lady’s Smock (Cardamine pratensis) is just coming into flower in the cemetery), you could make Lady’s Smock and Three-cornered Garlic Salad. Robin is of the opinion that the plant is the closest wild equivalent to Chinese Chives, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain,  so three-cornered garlic is a very handy free substitute.

I also think the pretty flowers would make a lovely addition to a leafy spring salad.

I find it a little bit amusing that this ‘invasive weed’ is one of the plants featured on the Borough Market website. Borough Market is a high-end food market close to London Bridge station, which sells all manner of delicacies, from native oysters to wild mushrooms. You can read a few more recipe suggestions here  but I suspect that it would be a lot cheaper to knock up some three-cornered garlic pesto yourself if you have any growing nearby. Certainly one way to cope with plants which outgrow their welcome is to turn them into lunch. However, should you have a pet tortoise, this is one of the plants that the Tortoise Table website recommends that you don’t feed to your reptile, on the basis that plants that grow from bulbs are not suitable fodder. Plus, who wants a shelled companion with onion breath? Though I suppose it would be easy enough to run away.

But enough of this silliness. From a medicinal point of view, three-cornered garlic is believed to have the same attributes as other alliums (the sulphur compounds which give onions and garlic their flavour are thought to act as a liver and blood tonic), though to a lesser extent. Interestingly, if there is (unusually) no sulphur in the soil, all allium species lose their flavour. The juice is said to act as a moth repellent, though I suspect that the onion scent might act as a person deterrent too. Furthermore, the whole plant is said to repel insects and moles. Personally, I would love to have a visit from a mole, but then I don’t have a lawn to worry about.

Three-cornered garlic has taught me a very valuable lesson. I had walked past the little stand of flowers above and completely ignored them because I thought they were white bluebells, or Loddon Lily. In a way, i was stereotyping them: ‘white bell-like flowers, long leaves, must be something I already know’. If I had stopped to really get to know them, to look at the stem and the leaves, and, most of all, to give them a sniff, I would have known that this was something different. As in all things, I need to pay attention to what’s in front of me, rather than just sticking it in a category and forgetting about it. The world is much more subtle and varied, more diverse, than I ever realised.

 

 

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 am sure that when you were children many of you, like me, will have picked a buttercup and held it under your chin to see if you ‘liked butter’, a most nonsensical way to carry on but an experience which, in these parts at least, seems to be almost universal. However, you would have difficulty performing the exercise with this buttercup, which I noticed in the cemetery last week. Although it has the leaves of a buttercup, and although the buds look familiar, the flowers are very strange. The petals look somehow stunted, as if they’ve been nibbled off by a famished caterpillar. And yet, it appears, this is a characteristic of the Goldilocks buttercup (Ranunculus auricomus), a plant in which almost every flower is deformed.

Why ‘Goldilocks’, I wondered? Well, the species name auricomus literally means ‘golden-hair’, so maybe the English name is an exact transliteration. Or, as someone suggested, maybe its woodland habitat put people in mind of the fairy story. Whatever the reason, it is a strange and delicate plant, all stem and stamen.

This species loves chalk (technically, it is a calcicole, another new word!) I was therefore surprised to find it growing in the heavy clay of the cemetery. However, every patch that I’ve found has appeared directly on top of a grave, so maybe something in the planting medium is subtly different, enabling the buttercup to thrive.

The Goldilocks buttercup reproduces asexually (known as apomixis) – it sets seed without need for cross-pollination, and every new plant is a clone of the parent. This means that there can be unique local populations, known as agamospecies, and several hundred of these have been identified in mainland Europe, though, as far as I know, no one has looked into the situation in the UK yet. Our growing expertise with genetic analysis has opened a whole can of worms with regard to plants. Once, a dandelion was a dandelion, but now there are known to be 40 endemic microspecies in the UK alone. It seems that no sooner do we clear up one mystery than hundreds more present themselves. Still, what an exciting time to be a geneticist!

The Goldilocks buttercup is native to the UK, and has a range that extends from Greenland (where it is sometimes found growing in the damp places beside waterfalls) right the way through northern Europe and Russia, and then into Alaska and the Western US. For this reason, the plant is sometimes known as the Greenland buttercup. However, it is slow to spread locally, and is seen as an indicator of ancient woodland. Were these buttercups growing in the woods that pre-date the cemetery, I wonder?

I wonder, too, about those deformed and missing petals. As the plant reproduces asexually, maybe the need to attract insects for pollination is not as strong as in other buttercups. Could it also be because, as each plant is a clone, any damaging genes will perpetuate themselves? In his book ‘Vegetable Teratology’, Maxwell T. Masters mentions that in damp woodland settings, the Goldilocks buttercup tends to have small, distorted petals and luxuriant leaf growth, but in more arid sites the petals are more complete, the leaves smaller. It’s almost as if the plant has a ‘growth budget’, which it expends according to the situation in which it finds itself. At any rate, the lack of petals doesn’t seem to have done these plants any harm, as they were growing in some numbers in the shade of the old hornbeams, surrounded by their close relatives the Lesser Celandines (Ranunculus ficaria).

What an unusual plant this is! I am used to seeing flora with all manner of galls and discolourations, their leaves nibbled and mined by their insect hosts (as are some of the leaves in the photograph below). I am familiar with the range of colours that can occur within even a small population of the same plant. And yet, I have never come across one before with distorted or absent petals through no obvious external cause. It just goes to show that nature is full of surprises.

All photos copyright Vivienne Palmer