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, there is no doubt at all that Mahonia (or Oregon Grape as it is often known) is largely a plant of parks and gardens, but I found this individual right on the edge of Alexandra Park and the north London Parkland Walk, where it appeared to be making a break for freedom. It is originally a plant of North America, and is named after ‘the first nurseryman in America’, Bernard McMahon (1775-1816) who curated the plant collection of explorers Lewis and Clark. The plant arrived in the UK in 1823. By 1874 it could be found in the wild, and it is sometimes deliberately planted as cover for game birds (much as snowberry was). With its spiny evergreen leaves, yellow flowers and, later, its bloom-covered blue berries, it is one of those plants that has some interest in every season. It also seems to tolerate clay soil, and so there are some very fine examples of the plant in East Finchley.

The plant has a lot going for it as food for animals. It is recommended by many organisations as a food-source for early emerging bumblebee queens and solitary bees. The flowers have a rather pleasant smell too. The berries are liked by blackbirds and mistle thrushes. The leathery leaves are also, surprisingly, a food plant for moths such as the Bright Line Brown Eye (once again, I am in love with the names of moths) and the Peppered moth.

However, mahonia is not only food for visitors to the garden – the ‘grapes’ have been used as human food. In North America, many native tribes ate the berries raw, whilst some turned them into jams and jellies, and others dried them. Should you have a superabundance of mahonia in your garden and an urge to knock up some preserves, you can find all the details you need at the Backwoods Home website. However, as many tribes people only ate the berries as a last resort, we can maybe assume that, whilst a useful source of vitamins, they are not as palatable as you might hope.

The wood of mahonia is bright yellow, and produces a dye of the same colour, while the berries produce a purple one. Richard Mabey notes in Flora Britannica that one young boy used the juice from the ‘grapes’ as very convincing fake blood. One can only imagine how much the child’s mother appreciated his inventiveness.

Mahonia has also long been used for everything from gastritis to syphilis by the native peoples of North America, and  there have also been some promising recent studies into its use in the treatment of psoriasis. Indeed, much as I hate to publicise it,  mahonia medicine has even made the hallowed pages of the Femail section of the Daily Mail. Why it’s in the ‘Femail’ section goodness only knows. As far as I know, men get psoriasis too. But it’s probably just as well not to get me started on gender differentiation in the media. We could be here all day.

And there is one more thing to mention about mahonia. Some plants react when touched – the ‘Sensitive plant’ or mimosa is one example. We had one in a pot when we were children, and I remember how the poor plant would behave when we touched it, the individual leaves creeping together as if terrified and then the whole ‘branch’ collapsing . How we laughed, spawn of Satan that we were. Well, New Scientist reports that more than 100 species of plants have touch-sensitive stamen, and that mahonia is one of them. On the Digital Botanic Garden website, there are photos of the stamen contracting after being touched – the theory is that this helps to force pollen onto the legs of any visiting insects. This is a remarkably quick reaction, taking less than a second in warm weather. We often think of plants as being slow-moving organisms, but the more I learn about them, the more I realise that they are intensely reactive beings, responding to their environment with great rapidity when necessary. Let’s never underestimate our flora. They’re a lot more dynamic than we give them credit for.

Credits

As usual, I’d like to credit Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’ and Sue Eland’s ‘Plant Lives‘ website for providing invaluable information.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Rasbak – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1087083

Photo Two – By ©entomart, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=313383

Photo Three – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.

Photo Four – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=880130

Photo Five – By The original uploader was Meggar at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1375500

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, how can it be that I have been doing the Wednesday Weed for two years, and yet have never described a member of the carrot family (Apiaceae)? It’s not as if I don’t pass these plants often, as cow parsley grows freely in Cherry Tree Wood, and Coldfall Wood.  Today, however, just one plant was in flower along the Parkland Walk, a most intriguing north London path that stretches from Highgate to Finsbury Park along the route of a disused railway line.

Cow parsley is also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, though in Flora Britannica Richard Mabey is of the opinion that this is a rather contrived name, possibly imported from North America, where the plant is widely naturalised. It is also known as Mother Die, a rather sinister title. It may be that this relates to a belief that bringing the plant into the house was unlucky, but more likely it is because although the Apiaceae contain the relatives of many of our food crops (including carrot, parsnips and celery), it also contains some of the most poisonous plants in the UK, such as hemlock and hemlock water-dropwort. In other words, it’s probably wise not to go eating the roots of this family (or indeed any other part) unless you are 100% confident of what you are doing. This may explain another regional name for cow parsley, ‘keck’ – my dictionary states that it is a 17th century name meaning ‘nausea’ or ‘disgust’. It seems that mis-identification in the carrot family has been causing problems for centuries.

The leaves of cow parsley look rather like those of ‘real’ parsley and chervil, and indeed they are said to taste sharper than chervil, with a hint of carrot. I would be inclined to leave them alone, if I were you. They are also said to form a good mosquito repellent, but again, beware – the leaves of the giant hogweed look somewhat similar (though it would be difficult to mistake cow parsley for something with stems 10cm thick) and can cause burns.

It always puzzles me when, as here, a single plant has burst into flower, months before its neighbours (cow parsley normally flowers in May in great abundance, as you can see below). So, Is there something about this particular spot that encourages precocity – maybe richer soil, or more light? Or is it something genetic? If the latter, this early-flowering would be a good illustration of the kind of variation that might give a plant an evolutionary advantage in the right conditions. At any rate, this plant has certainly got a jump on its many, many neighbours. Let’s just hope that there are some hoverflies around soon to pollinate it, or all its efforts will have been in vain.

In spite of the superstition surrounding the plant, it is popular with flower arrangers, and to my surprise I discovered that it has been ‘improved’ and several varieties can be bought. Here, for example, is ‘Ravenswing’, with black foliage.  Is it more beautiful than the plant in its natural state? I shall leave it for you to judge.

As you might expect, this attractive plant has inspired artists, including Elizabeth Sonrel, who lived from 1874 to 1953 and who painted in the Art Nouveau style. Below is her painting ‘Our Lady of the Cow Parsley’. It reminds me very much of the paintings of the seaasons by Mucha that used to adorn the walls of our family house. Only a pedant would point out that the flowers look rather more like Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) than cow parsley, but if you’re looking for a pedant, you’ve come to the right place.

The Latin species name for cow parsley, ‘sylvestris’, usually means ‘of the woods’, and it is often found in the less shady parts of a forest, along a path or ride. However, it is an adaptable plant, found en masse beside hedgerows and walls, a frothy sheet of delicate white in spring. Each solitary flower is a modest little five-petalled thing, but a single plant can have up to five thousand individual flowers. No wonder beetles and hoverflies and dance flies can often be seen clambering over the flowerheads, giddy with nectar and coated in pollen. And in case you’ve never seen a dance fly before, there’s a photo of one below. The name ‘dance fly’ comes from their erratic movements in flight. Also known as ‘dagger flies’ because of their sharp protruding mouthparts, many of these flies are predators on other insects, and perform an invaluable role in keeping insects that we find pestiferous under control. So, in all our justified concern for bees, let’s not forget these other, less charismatic creatures, who make our lives easier without being noticed at all.

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, close to the entrance of Coldfall Wood there is a tiny patch of Early Crocus (Crocus tommasinianus). How fragile this plant is, and yet how strong! It has burst through the hard-packed clay soil, sometimes lifting whole twigs and stones in its urge to reach the sunlight.

There are two very similar species of crocus that you are likely to see naturalised in the UK. The Dutch or Spring Crocus (Crocus vernus) looks similar to the Early Crocus, but it has a mauve or purple ‘throat’ which is never lighter in colour than the flowers themselves.

‘Tommies’ are native to Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, and were named for the botanist Muzio G. Spirito de Tommasini (1794-1879), who was Mayor of the city of Trieste. They are relatively late arrivals, first cultivated in 1847, and not recorded in the wild until 1963, although this may have been due to confusion  with the Spring Crocus. The plant naturalises easily in lawns and churchyards, and there is a fine patch in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, which has no doubt grown from a handful of bulbs planted on a grave.

You might not think it to look at them, but crocuses (or, indeed croci) are part of the Iris family. The name is thought to derive from the Sanskrit word for ‘saffron’ (kunkuman) although it is the autumn crocus (Crocus sativus) that produces this spice, not these spring-flowering species. They do have the most intense yellow pollen, however, and you can see how the name has arisen.

In Greek mythology, Crocus was a human youth in love with a nymph called Smilax. Apparently irritated by his audacity, the gods turned Crocus into, well, a crocus. Smilax was turned into either a yew tree or bindweed, depending on your source. The Greek gods were certainly a touchy bunch.

In the financial world, a ‘crocus’ is a company or sector which recovers quickly after an economic downturn. The waxy cuticle helps it to survive even when there is late frost or snow on the ground, so you can see how the comparison has developed.

As I researched this piece, it became apparent that the poor old crocus had been the focus of some truly execrable poetry. Certainly, its bravery in sticking its petally head above the soil into the teeth of a snowstorm has been extensively celebrated, to the extent that Sherman Alexie, the editor of New American Poetry 2015, has this to say:

‘None of us ever needs to write another poem about crocuses, or croci, or however you prefer to pluralize it. Trust me, we poets have exhausted the poetic potential of the crocus. If any of you can surprise me with a new kind of crocus poem then I will mail you one hundred dollars.’

But, wait! I wonder if Mr Alexie has ever read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem ‘Spring’. I have to confess to loving this. It made me laugh out loud at the unexpectedness of the last few lines, for all their curmudgeonliness.  And if Ms Millay were still alive, I think she would deserve her prize.

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Ruth Fainlight’s powerful, disturbing piece on crocuses would surely also be a contender for a new way to look at the plant. I hadn’t come across the poet before, but I shall certainly be reading more of her work.

Crocuses
These crocuses are appalling:
pale, bare, tender stems rising
through the muddy winter-faded turf,

shivering petals the almost luminous mauve
of lurid bruises on the frightened faces
and naked bodies of men, women, children

herded into a forest clearing or
towards a siding where a train has halted
and the trucks are waiting.

But perhaps there is much to be said for ending with a poem that was chalked on a blackboard at Des Moines High School for all the children to learn. The sight of crocuses, for me, means that the world is still turning, in spite of all the things we are doing to it. The clock of the seasons ticks on, however erratically.

Daffodils and tulips
impatient underground
in March sent up a crocus
to have a look around.

She yelled, “It still is winter,
there is frost on everything.”
But a passerby who saw her said,
“A crocus!  It is spring!”

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Franz Xaver (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two –  By Vasile Cotovanu https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasile23/8606299884

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, is there any plant more ubiquitous or more recognisable at this time of year than the daffodil? I spotted this fine collection of yellow trumpets outside the flats on the corner of Church Lane in East Finchley, and, with their ‘heads’ all pointing in the same direction they remind me of nothing so much as a flock of flamingos during their mating ritual.

The problem with daffodils is that, although they are native plants, and do still grow in the wild (although to nothing like the extent that they used to, as we shall see) they are also planted just about everywhere. And I can see why. They are so emblematic of spring, so cheerful in their yellow finery and such a relief as the winter days start to lengthen that they bring a smile to the most miserable of faces.

So, what does a truly wild daffodil look like?

The truly wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus pseudonarcissus) has a single flower on every stem, creamy white petals and a darker yellow trumpet. Where it likes the habitat, it can be very prolific – think of Wordsworth’s ‘host of golden daffodils’. An area around the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border used to be called ‘The Golden Triangle’ and in the 1930’s the Great Western Railway ran ‘Daffodil Specials’ from London, so that people could walk among the flowers and buy bunches to take home. The daffodils were an invaluable source of early spring income for those who farmed the land on which they grew, and for the casual labourers that were employed to pick them.

These days, wild daffodils seem to occur in very discrete areas – as Richard Mabey points out in Flora Britannica, they can be found in parts of south Devon, pockets of the Black Mountains in Wales, the Sussex Weald, Farndale in Yorkshire and the Lake District (for a list of wild daffodil sites, have a look at the Wildlife Trust list here.) But there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the distribution of the populations – daffodils are not fussy with regard to habitat (as anyone who has grown them can attest) and perfect habitat is sometimes shunned. Could it be that the popularity of the daffodil as a plant for cutting has led to it being artificially spread to some areas and not to others? I suspect we shall never know.

Daffodils are also known as Lenten Lilies, as they start to appear roughly when Lent occurs – this year it starts on February 10th, so the plants here are a little early. However, although for us they are such symbols of spring, it was also believed in some parts of England that bringing daffodils indoors was unlucky (probably because to some eyes, the plants appear to be hanging their heads in shame). In particular, no chicks or ducklings would survive on a farmstead where the daffodils were brought inside the house, maybe because of the sense of a link between the golden colour of the flowers and the yellow fuzz of the baby birds. In Wales, however, where the daffodil is the national flower, the first person to spot a plant in bloom would be set to receive more gold than silver during the coming year. Other folklore included the belief that pointing at a daffodil would prevent it from coming into bloom. To dream of a daffodil is said to indicate that love and happiness is on the way.

It is clear that daffodils have a somewhat mixed folkloric reputation, though they are currently being rehabilitated through their association with the Marie Curie Cancer Care Trust – many of us have had reason to be thankful to the carers and nurses of the organisation, who help to support those with cancer and their families. In this context the daffodil is a symbol of hope and kindness. However, daffodils were said to be the plants that Persephone was gathering when she was snatched by the lord of the underworld, and they were also said to grow in Hades, on the banks of the river Styx. In many cultures they have been grave flowers, so there is no escaping their association with death and loss.

What is little known about daffodils is that they are poisonous. The bulbs contain two alkaloids and a glycoside, and on The Poison Garden website (my go-to site for anything to do with ‘dangerous’ plants), John Robertson explains how most poisoning occurs when people mistake the bulbs for onions. As little as half a bulb is sufficient to cause a severe stomach upset but, as most cases resolve themselves quickly, daffodil poisoning is rarely a cause of hospitalisation. The website has some wonderful stories of how poisoning occurs, including the one below:

‘In September 2009, a visitor to this site sent details of her experience of daffodil poisoning. Her mother-in-law gave her a bag of ‘mystery vegetables’ which included some daffodil bulbs. It was only after she had used them in a family meal and all three of them had begun to vomit that she listened to an answerphone message from her mother asking if she had planted the daffs yet and realised what had happened. She sought medical advice and the family ended up spending several hours, of a holiday weekend, sitting in the hospital ‘just in case’.’

Well, one of the joys of writing this blog is all the things that I find out as I research my pieces. I will make certain to keep the daffodil bulbs and the onions separate, and I heartily advise you to do the same.

Incidentally, the leaves are also poisonous, and there was an incident in Bristol in 2012 when a Chinese supermarket was stocking bunches of daffodils in bud, and the shoppers were mistaking the plants for Chinese Chives. Around ten people were treated in hospital. Clearly, narcissi are not plants to be messed with.

Just because a plant is poisonous, however, does not mean that it doesn’t have medicinal uses. One of the alkaloids in daffodils, galantamine (also present in snowdrops) is currently being researched as an early stage treatment for Alzeheimer’s Disease. It has been found that galantamine is present in much higher concentrations when the plant is grown at altitude, and so 120 acres of daffodils have been planted in the Black Mountains in Wales to see if it is possible to harvest the chemical in an economic way (ten tons of daffodil bulbs are required to produce one kilogram of galantamine). At £600 per ton, this could be a useful source of income for beleaguered Welsh hill farmers, whilst at the same time providing help for the sufferers of this infernal disease. Let’s hope so. For further details, have a look on the Joint Nature Conservation Council website here.

Daffodils are probably too common to be truly appreciated – there is none of the sense of awe that stumbling across a bluebell wood or a bank of snowdrops has. And yet, it has not always been so. Have a look at the painting by Vincent van Gogh, below. It has a hallucinatory quality, that sense of walking through a world transformed by abundant and unexpected beauty. There is something precious about the butter-yellow of a daffodil emerging from its papery shroud and turning its face to the sun. Like all common things, it is worthy of a little more attention than we usually bestow upon it.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Pedros Szekely – http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosz/1955192221/, CC BY 2.0, $3

Photo Two – By Meneerke bloem (Own work) [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

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, it is very hard to find a flowering weed in January, but two things are guaranteed. If I find an area of mown public grass, there will be at least a couple of daisies in it. And if I pay attention, I will find a dandelion in flower. This is a ‘weed’ so common that we all think we know exactly what it looks like, what with those toothed leaves (Dandelion is a corruption of ‘dents de lion’) and that starburst of yellow ‘petals’ (each one of which turns out to be a separate flower). Many of us will know that the leaves are edible, and that the name that the French give to the plant, Pissenlit, means ‘wet the bed’, a reference to its diuretic qualities: in fact, it was believed that even smelling a dandelion was enough to bring on a bout of incontinence. However, it turns out that what I knew about the dandelion was only a tiny part of the story of this extraordinary plant.

To start with, if we look up the plant ‘Dandelion’, we will find that although it is often known as Taraxacum officinalis, it is actually a complex of at least 230 microspecies which can only be told apart by experts. 40 of these microspecies are endemic to the UK, which means that they live here and nowhere else in the world. The reason for this is that Dandelions reproduce by something called apomixis – the seeds that are produced in those wonderful dandelion ‘clocks’ are often clones , which means that all the plants in a certain area will be identical, leading to the gradual production of very localised microspecies.

In addition to the names mentioned above, the dandelion has some other very fine vernacular names. In Swedish, the plant is known as the worm rose because of the many little insects (thrips) that are often found in the flower head. In Italian, it has the name ‘pisacan (dog piss) because it is found at the side of the pavement, where we might expect canines to scent mark. Many names reflect the dandelion ‘clock’ and its use as a way of telling the time – Richard Mabey reports that the number of breaths needed to remove all the seeds told the hour – and so we have ‘Clockflower’, ‘Fairy Clock’, and ‘Peasant’s Clock’. The plant is also known as ‘Swine’s Snout’, though I am having a bit of trouble working out why this might be. ‘Monk’s Head’ is probably a cheeky reference to the bald seedhead once all the feathery seeds have left.

Dandelion is seen as the scourge of lawn-lovers everywhere, and as a perennial with a deep tap-root there are all kinds of ways of eliminating it – some suggest pulling up the plant and putting a teaspoonful of salt into the hole. But as you might expect, I disagree – because of their year-round flowering, dandelions are an invaluable source of early season nectar and pollen for bees, and are the food plant of the pearl-bordered fritillary, one of our earliest emerging spring butterflies, and a beauty to boot.

The leaves of dandelions have long been used in salads (and are enjoying a revival what with all these new restaurants that celebrate foraging). The root was used as a coffee substitute during the Second World War. But the Plant Lives website also mentions that the people of Minorca believe that they owe their survival to the dandelion after a plague of locusts ate their crops. It is believed that the many medicinal and culinary uses of the dandelion were first recorded in the medieval Middle East (the genus name Taraxacum comes from the Persian name for the plant), and one delicacy, Yublo cake,  contains dandelion buds, rose petals and honey.

Dandelion is also said to be a good plant for growing in orchards: although some bees may prefer it to the flowering fruit trees, later in the year the plant produces large quantities of ethylene, which are said to encourage the fruit to ripen. Some 93 species of insect have been recorded as visiting dandelions, so this is a very fine bank of possible pollinators for the farmer. No wonder dandelions are often encouraged in these situations, and they have extraordinary beauty when seen en masse, as here in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery in East Finchley.

The humble dandelion has even attracted the attention of artists. Here, for example, is a watercolour painting by Albrecht Durer, a most realistic depiction called ‘A Great Piece of Turf’, created in 1503. I love the way that the ‘weeds’ are so lovingly and accurately depicted, as if they needed no adornment or improvement to make them a worthy object of study. And, of course, he was right. Any living thing, regarded with sufficient attention, becomes miraculous.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By John Liu [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two – By Sheila Sund from Salem, United States (Dandelion center) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three – I, Michael Kranewitter [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four – By Albrecht Dürer – NgELdACk3I8Jkg at Google Cultural Institute, zoom level maximum, Public Domain, $3

All other photographs copyright Vivienne Palmer