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…..

I am finding Garlic Mustard everywhere at the moment – in the cemetery, along the edge of the allotments, everywhere that is damp and shady. I also found it in the hedgerows of Somerset, where it seems very at home, peeking out from a mass of bluebells, nettles and stitchwort, and living up to its alternative name of Jack-by-the-hedge.  Its leaves are a most toothsome shade of pale green, and smell slightly of garlic when crushed. The four-petalled flowers are in a cross or  ‘cruciform’ shape (hence ‘crucifers’): this is an indicator that we are dealing with a member of the Brassica, or cabbage family. Many of this family share Garlic Mustard’s pungency: some have that familiar school-dinners sulphur smell when squashed or cooked, and other have the stronger notes of mustard or horseradish. Human beings appear to have been using Garlic Mustard to spice their food for a very long time: seeds of the plant were found in pots that are over 6000 years old, along with mammal and fish remains, suggesting that some kind of stew had been made with Garlic Mustard as a flavouring. The plant has much higher Vitamin A and Vitamin C levels than most commercially-grown fruit and vegetables (8,600 units/100g and 190 mcg/100g respectively), and so would have been an excellent choice as a pot-herb or flavouring.

The mustard flavour is not there for our benefit, of course. Deer seem to dislike the taste, and so it goes largely unforaged. However, the scent attracts the midges and hoverflies that are its main pollinators. It is also the foodplant of the Orange-tip Butterfly caterpillar, and the long green larvae particularly like the seed pods of the plant. The caterpillars  seem to be perfectly matched, in shape and colour,  to the seedpods, which are their favourite part of the plant.

I saw my first Orange-tip butterflies today, jousting above a patch of Garlic Mustard. I shall have to go back later to see if I can see any eggs. They are the colour of barley-sugar, as elegant as the butterfly that made them.

In the UK, Garlic Mustard is part of a mix of woodland flora, and behaves like a responsible part of the plant community. In eastern North America, however, it has become something of a problem plant. In the UK, 69 species of insect feed on the plant, but across the Atlantic nothing does. Occasionally, butterflies that are related to our Orange-tip lay their eggs on the plant, because it looks similar to native crucifers, but the larvae sicken and die. Deer mostly disdain Garlic Mustard, as they do here. Furthermore, the plant seems to produce chemicals which inhibit the growth of other plants. This chemical warfare doesn’t happen in the plant’s natural range, possibly because defences have evolved to keep everything in balance. However, I note that Garlic Mustard was first imported to America as a food plant in 1800, and wonder whether it has always been a problem, or if something else has changed which has made it more vigorous than it was previously? As always, these things are not simple.

However, it’s fair to say that the plant is being given a run for its money. There are Garlic Mustard Pulling competitions, where different areas compete to see how much of the plant they can eradicate. There are many recipes online for tasty ways to use Garlic Mustard once you’ve pulled it up: here is a Garlic Mustard Roulade  and here we have some Garlic Mustard Hummous. Both of these sound rather good, and would be fun if you have a superabundance of the plant. More drastic measures include the application of herbicides such as glyphosate, and even use of controlled fires.  But I suspect that, in the end, the plant and its environment will come to some kind of accommodation, even if the timescale is one that humans will find it rather difficult to live with. Having taken a living thing from its normal habitat for our own purposes, we are now left with the consequences of our actions. Let’s hope that the remedy doesn’t prove worst than the disease.

 

 

 

 

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, not far from where I live is a road called The Bishop’s Avenue, which has been in the news recently. It is home to some of the most enormous, pretentious, overblown dwellings in the country (guide price for one recently – £45 million). Furthermore, many of the houses are barely used, being retained as boltholes by people with lots of money who live in the more volatile parts of the world. Some of the properties are literally falling down which is obscene when you consider how many people are desperate for a home of their own. The Bishop’s Avenue exemplifies everything that is bad about what’s happening to the city that I love. But, as many of the houses continue their slow disintegration into ruin, the verges and wasteland that surround them are becoming increasingly fascinating to those with an interest in plants, and the way that they colonise newly-available spaces.

So it was that anyone waiting at the traffic lights on Sunday would have seen me positively dancing about with delight, because there, amongst a positive scrum of opportunistic plants, was a single Borage.

Why do I love Borage so much? Well, it is bright blue, and furry, and has an exquisite pointed flower that reminds me of a hummingbird. It is the plant par excellence for bees – not only is it so full of nectar that if you nibble a bloom it gives you a little hit of sweetness, but the nectar replenishes itself within two minutes of being drained. Furthermore, it is a member of my very favourite plant family (yes, I know you aren’t supposed to have favourites, but hey), the Boraginaceae, which also includes Comfrey in its many forms, Green Alkanet, Viper’s Bugloss, Lungwort and all the Forget-me-nots.

Borage has been in cultivation in the UK since at least 1200 – its leaves and flowers were much used as a herb, and were included in fruit cups for their cucumber flavour. It was first recorded in the wild in 1777. It is used as a vegetable in many places along the Mediterranean, where it is a native plant, and also in the ‘Green Sauce’ of Frankfurt.

Borage is also the richest known plant source of GLA (Gamma-linolenic Acid). The ‘Starflower Oil’ that can be purchased in chemists is made from Borage. Traditionally, it was used as a cure for melancholy, and also as a supplement for women suffering from PMS or menopausal symptoms. Borage leaves have also been used as a poultice for swellings, in the same way as those of its cousin, Comfrey.

It is also said to be an excellent companion plant, distracting tomato worms from their preferred hosts, and, of course, attracting a host of pollinators.

Borage is a wonderful plant for bees. It has the alternative names of ‘bee bread’ and ‘bee flower’, and these are apt descriptions.

I am fast running out of space for plants in my north-facing back garden, but it seems to me that I’ll have to have a pot of borage in my front garden, where it gets the sun and the bees can enjoy it. After all, who knows how long the wild plant that I saw will have to enjoy its moment of flowering? It can’t be too long before some developer plonks a twenty-bedroomed house on top of it.

 

 

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, most of the flowers of early spring are rather delicate, pastel-coloured plants, subtle and self-effacing. Well, this could never be said of the Marsh Marigold, which has burst forth across the muddy riverbeds of the Everglades in Coldfall Wood like a positive wash of sunshine.

Also known as Kingcup, Marsh Marigold is not a marigold at all – the name comes from Mary Gold, and refers to its use in medieval churches as a tribute to the Virgin Mary –  but a buttercup. And what a buttercup! I love the slight shininess of the petals, the exuberance of the gently-opening stamen, and the way that hoverflies seem to fall onto them in a positive swoon of appreciation for their generosity.

Although you might think that its sheer tropical boldness implies that this plant hales from warmer climes, it is in fact one of the most ancient of our native plants – Richard Mabey speaks of how, unlike most flowering plants, it survived the glaciations of the last ice age, and flourished in the marshy meltwaters. Its longevity as part of the plant community of these islands is reflected in its wide variety of vernacular names: Mayblobs, Mollyblobs, Water-blobs and, my personal favourite, The Publican. I guess that these names reflect the solidity of the plant, and the sense of hospitality that comes with the abundance of bright flowers. Once, when there were more meadows and cattle wallows, this plant must have been by far the boldest and most obvious sign that spring had finally come, more so than the delicate primroses and lesser celandine and wood anemones. It is like a great trumpet-blast of optimism wherever it grows.

The plant has a special place in the hearts of the citizens of the Isle of Man, where many plant rituals survived for much longer than in mainland Britain. Marsh Marigolds were strewn on doorsteps on May Eve, and it is brought into the house as a symbol of spring, and as a way of blessing the house. In England, there was also a belief that it was protective against malignant fairies and other little folk of bad intent, and  Marsh Marigolds would be picked on the evening of 30th April and dropped through every letter box to dissuade the fey folk from any mischief. Cattle were also garlanded in Marsh Marigolds as a protection against the evil eye, even though it is actually poisonous to cattle.

In Latvia, Marsh Marigold is known as Gundega, a word that means ‘burning fire’. This is presumably because of the dermatitis that can be caused by handling the plant – like all buttercups, some people have an adverse reaction to its sap. In spite of this, it has had some culinary uses – Queen Victoria is said to have enjoyed boiled mutton with ‘capers-with-a-difference’, the difference being that the ‘capers’ were the buds of Marsh Marigold. To confuse matters somewhat, in North America, where the plant is native in the north-east, it is sometimes known as Cowslip, and the leaves were cooked by early settlers as a vegetable, in spite of the plant’s poisonous nature.

The Iroquois also used this plant as an antidote to someone who had imbibed a love potion. My source, the ‘Plant Lives‘ website, states that it seemed to make the lovestruck swain ‘very sick’. I suspect this would rather have taken the shine off of any passionate feelings that they might have been developing.

What is particularly magical to me about Marsh Marigold is the way that, after flowering, it completely disappears. I have one in my pond, and every year I am anxious in case it doesn’t grow, so complete is its vanishing act. And then, in just a few weeks, the juicy green leaves appear, followed by the fat round buds, and eventually the butter-coloured flowers. Of course, this is the way of many plants, but it is the one that I am always most relieved to see. It feels as if, on some level, the great pulse of the world is still working.

 

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, if the county plant of London is the Rose-Bay Willowherb, then the Postal Code Plant of East Finchley must be the Green Alkanet. As I wander the streets, it seems to be obligatory to have at least one of these hairy-leaved beauties peering out from under the Buddleia, or popping forth boldly from the bottom of a fence. And yet, I cannot remember it from my childhood in East London, so I wonder if it has a preference for the heady heights of North London.

It is, in fact, a member of the Borage and Comfrey family, and, as you might expect, is popular with bees, especially early in the season when there isn’t much else about. Its leaves survive right through the winter, hence its Latin moniker, sempervirens, which means ‘always green’.

Green Alkanet was introduced into gardens in 1700, and was first recorded in the wild in 1724, so it has been with us for a long time. It is a true Londoner inasmuch as it can’t abide acidic soils, and so the cold, claggy clay of the capital suits it down to the ground (literally). It is a very hairy plant – the stems are hairy, the lavender buds are hairy, the leaves are hairy (and sometimes feature white spots as well). It is readily attacked by rusts (as in the specimen above). All in all, it is something of a bruiser, a street-fighter of a plant whose toughness belies its delicate flowers.

‘Alkanet’ is an interesting word, thought to derive from the Arabic word for the plant-based red dye Henna. The word is also the root of the names of Dyers’ Bugloss (Alkanna tinctoria) and Common Bugloss (Anchusa arvensis), to which Green Alkanet is closely related. In fact, Anchusa is derived from the Latin word for paint. The  books that I’ve read seem to agree that a red dye can be extracted from the sturdy root of the plant, and the WildflowerFinder website, which has a special interest in plant chemistry, goes further, suggesting that the extracts from the root can be used to make a purple or burgundy dye, with alkaline compounds being used to increase the blue pigment, and acid ones turning it red again. There is also a strong suggestion elsewhere that the plant was deliberately introduced to provide dyes for cloth, being cheaper than true Henna, which is extracted from the Henna tree (Lawsonia inermis).

Green Alkanet has several other uses – the flowers are apparently edible, and I can just imagine them frozen into ice-cubes and clinking away in a gin and tonic. Being a member of the comfrey family, the leaves can also be composted, or rotted down to provide liquid fertiliser. But it’s as a plant for pollinators that it finds its true vocation, the white heart of the flower acting as a target for all those thirsty early bees. It is yet another of those plants that we would be delighted with if we planted it deliberately, but which is undervalued because it’s just a ‘weed’. It seems as if we find it difficult to appreciate the beauty that comes to us for free, like grace.

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, on April Fool’s Day I headed out to a new cemetery with my botanical friend, to see what we could find. Unlike St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, which has bramble tangles and secret, woody places, East Finchley Cemetery is well manicured and full of splendid Victorian memorials, like the ones below.

So, we were not hoping for much in the way of wild flowers. A man was wandering around in a desultory fashion, waving a leaf blower in spite of no leaf having the audacity to fall on those bowling-green lawns. The noise was ear-splitting. In an attempt to get away from the racket, we headed ‘off-piste’ to explore an area behind a row of well-tended graves, and there we found our reward.

Cowslips are not the first primulas to come into flower – the Common Primrose has that honour. But what a splendid plant it is. Each stem can hold up to thirty blooms, which seem to erupt in a yellow fountain. The pale, soft green of the calyx sets off the gold of petals and the five apricot-coloured  spots at the heart of the flower. The plant is said to smell of apricots too, but as usual I forgot to check this out. If you see some, have a good sniff and let me know.

Once upon a time, our fields and meadows were full of Cowslips – the name refers to them being found amongst cowpats. People made cowslip wine, and for a most excellent recipe, described by one Mr Moxon as ‘right good’ back in 1764, have a look here. The path of a bridal couple was strewn with cowslips, and young women wove them into their hair on May Day. But, as with so many of our country wildflowers, they were soon to be pushed to the margins by changes in agricultural practices. Old grassland was ploughed up, meadows drained, and everything was sprayed with herbicide, including some field margins and roadsides. The ‘freckle-face’ of the Cowslip was soon a rarity, and so was the Duke of Burgundy butterfly, whose caterpillars feed on Cowslip.

So, it was a great pleasure to find this cowslip here, lonely as it was. Cemeteries and churchyards are sanctuaries for all manner of wild plants and animals, and more and more of these sites are being managed with this in mind. And we are not as laissez-faire with the chemicals as we once were, which is just as well, bearing in mind their effects on everything, from bees to humans, who came into contact with them.

Cowslips are woven into the history of the British Isles. Shakespeare mentions it in The Tempest, as the bed of Arial:

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.’

John Milton also writes of the plant, in his Song of a May Morning:

‘Now the bright morning star, day’s harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The flowering May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.’

Spring flowers must have been welcomed with a very special kind of relief, in the days when you could never be sure if your winter supplies would last until the warm weather returned. To me, the Cowslip is a sign that the world has turned towards the sun again, but in earlier, harder times there must have been a feeling of joy that the cold and the dark had been survived. No wonder May Day was such a celebration.

Cowslips have also been used for their medicinal properties, as you might expect from a plant that has grown beside us for so long. It was believed that a lotion made from Cowslips would remove wrinkles and freckles, with maybe an indication of the old ‘Doctrine of Signatures’ – the plant has little orange freckles in its flowers, so maybe it will help us to remove them! It was believed to be sedative, to be good for coughs and for rheumatic pain, and no less a person than Hildegard of Bingen recommended using the leaves to make ointment.

Occasionally, a red-flowered Cowslip is found, and there is a belief that this is because the seed was planted upside down. How you would know which way up it was supposed to go puzzles me somewhat, but the plant is very different in its red form, bold and defiant.

The Cowslip is considered a magical plant in other ways, too. The Cowslip is supposed to be able to open the doors of caves filled with hidden treasure. To dream of a Cowslip is a sign of unexpected good luck. In the language of flowers, it symbolises ‘comeliness and willing grace’. And furthermore, it is, apparently, the birthday flower for 22nd September, which is my wedding anniversary.

No wonder I love it, and was so delighted to see it so unexpectedly last week. I hope that it will continue its fightback, and that soon our churchyards and field-edges and ‘waste ground’ will be full of it.