Goodness, Readers, I was at the Sunshine Garden Centre on Monday, on a bleak, chilly, damp morning, but was heartily cheered up by the tremendous array of primroses, primulas and polyanthus. Clearly the plant breeders have the bit between their teeth now, as I have never seen so many variations.

I am noticing a lot of double primroses about at the moment – I’m not a great fan of double flowers as they have a lot less pollinator value than the single ones, but they are impressive nonetheless

However, in my heart I love the basic primrose best, with its buttermilk petals and butter-coloured centre. In my garden they usually fall prey to slugs, though maybe I’ll give them another go if I can find a reliable source. In the meantime, let’s see what I had to say about the plants a whole ten years ago, back in 2016.

Dear Readers, those of you who read Saturday’s post will know that I’m spending a lot of time in our local cemetery at the moment, which gives me plenty of time to admire the primroses that are just coming into bloom. They seem to favour sites where the graves themselves have practically disappeared, and have mostly, I’m sure, spread from a couple of primroses planted when the ground was first turned and the headstones, now long-gone, first erected. Close to where I first spotted the fox sunning himself there are hundreds of primroses, poking their heads through the moss and dead leaves like so many eager fishes.

The late Oliver Rackham suggested that primroses will only really prosper where the soil is rich, and where there are higher than average levels of mineral nutrients. If this is so, maybe the primroses are taking advantage of the recycling of the bodies of those who died so long ago. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey notes that the Victorians often planted primroses on the graves of children, which adds a note of melancholy to those patches of prettiness.

The name ‘primrose’ means ‘first rose’, referring to the way that the plant is one of the first spring flowers to come into bloom (though it is not, of course, a rose, being a member of the Primulaceae family). This family includes, to my surprise, such dissimilar plants as cyclamen, pimpernels and creeping jenny.

Primroses come in many different forms, as anyone who has visited a garden centre lately will know. The popular, brash polyanthus is a cross between the native primrose and primula veris, the cowslip. How all those reds and blues came to be is anybody’s guess, but there is a fair amount of diversity even among wild plants. The yellow ‘eye’ in the centre of the plants above can be found in native primroses, but may also have been bred for. There are also occasional ‘rhubarb and custard’ primroses amongst the cream and yellow ones, which I can only imagine have popped up by themselves, over time.

April 19th is Primrose Day, which makes me happy because it is also my brother’s birthday. A bouquet of primroses is placed on Disraeli’s statue outside Westminster Abbey, because these were the politician’s favourite flower. They are also strongly associated with Easter, and, along with daffodils and chocolate eggs, seem to be a popular component of presents over the season. Primroses are also the county flower of Devon.

As I mentioned in last year’s post about the Cowslip, primroses come in two forms: Pin flowers and Thrum flowers. For pollination to be successful, it needs to be between flowers of different forms. Each plant will be either a Pin plant or a Thrum plant. In this way, the plant ensures that it cannot pollinate itself, a fact that helps to ensure diversity.

The leaves and flowers of primroses are said to be edible – certainly the blooms would make a lovely addition to a spring salad (maybe with some English asparagus if there’s any about). In The Ecologist, there’s a lovely (and very honest) article about the joys of cooking with something as delicate as a primrose flower by Susan Clark, and the end result is a primrose meringue nest drizzled with primrose honey, which sounds absolutely delightful. Do have a look at the article here. It made me roar with laughter.

A delicious dish called ‘primrose pottage’ was made from rice, honey, almonds, saffron and ground primrose flowers, and very delicious it sounds too.

The flowers can also be used to make primrose wine, which sounds like one of those drinks that you  pack in a picnic basket and drink under a fine old oak tree while the bees buzz languidly past. Well, I can dream. Most of my picnics involve knocking over the wine, noticing that the cream has gone off, being visited by curious and very muddy cows and suddenly realising that one of those cows is actually, well, a bull.

However, before you rush out with a wicker trug, wearing your best bonnet, to gather primrose flowers, note that they are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which makes it illegal to pick wild primroses or remove them from the wild. Best to get planting in your back garden I think, though as you need 350 primrose petals to make 5 litres of wine I hope you have an extensive acreage.

The primrose also has a long history as a medicinal plant. A Modern Herbal explains that, for Pliny, the primrose was almost a panacea for the treatment of paralysis, rheumatism and gout. Culpeper described how the leaves ‘made as fine a salve to heal wounds as any I know’. Another renowned herbalist, Gerard, notes that primrose tea, ‘drunk in the month of May is famous for curing the phrensie’. So next time you are visited by the phrensie, you know what to do.

So, as I go on my nightly visits to the cemetery for jam sandwich distribution, I am much heartened by the companionship of the primroses, which seem to glow in the half-light. I walk back from my mission, scuffing through the dead leaves and watching the wood pigeons fighting over the ivy-berries. And all along the way, the primroses edge the path, and extend off in every direction. If this is Shakespeare’s ‘primrose path of dalliance’, I am all for it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, I was walking along a muddy footpath with a dear friend last week when, in spite of the chilly air, a waft of honeyed sweetness came up from this most inconspicuous of bushes. I have raved on about it before, but what a delight it is, especially at this time of year when the days are so short and grey, and the world seems to be going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. We need to take our joys where we find them, so keep your nose peeled (?) for this plant. Interestingly, although it’s a member of the Box family it doesn’t appear to be attacked by the dreaded Box Moth which has been ravaging knot gardens all around the country.

Note that there are several species of Christmas Box about – the one I wrote about originally was Sarcococca hookeriana. However, they seem to have very similar characteristics, and as plant taxonomy is a moveable feast in terms of what things are called I shall assume that the two species are as alike as makes no difference.

And now, onwards….

Dear Readers, I know that it isn’t Christmas, but when my friend L brought me some Christmas Box last week it felt like a present! Christmas Box has the most remarkable sweet scent –  it’s lovely outside, preferably planted by a door so you can get a whiff every time you go past, but indoors the smell swells to a kind of perfumed crescendo. The scent lasted for almost a week, and is only really fading today. It’s made me think that I should definitely plant some, and indeed there are some berries, so maybe I’ll give it a go.

And now, let’s see what information I found about this deliciously scented plant when I first wrote about it back in 2019.

Dear Readers, in continuance of my theme of winter-scented plants I was pleased to find a whole front garden full of Christmas box on my travels around the County Roads today. This is a very unassuming plant, as most members of the Buxaceae are, but those little white flowers produce a heady, bewitching scent. It can be so strong in a confined space that I’ve watched people look around in all directions to try to find the source, expecting a much bigger, showier plant. This particular variety, known as ‘Purple Stem’ for obvious reasons, was given a Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit. I rather liked that the owner of the garden had had the courage of their convictions and had planted the whole place up with the plant. The massed flowers will be useful for any early-emerging pollinators, though any bee unwise enough to show its furry head this morning will find a very chilly welcome.

This particular species of box is named after the estimable scientist and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 to 1911). What a life the man had! He travelled to the Antarctic with the Ross exhibition of 1839-43, performed a geological survey of Great Britain, went to the Himalayas and India (where he probably encountered Christmas box), then on to Palestine, Morocco and the western United States. He, was a close friend of Darwin and was one of the founders of Kew Gardens. In between times he married twice and fathered nine children, though I suspect he had little opportunity to spend any time with them.

In addition to Christmas box, Hooker had several other plants named after him, including this splendid Kashmiri iris, Iris hookeriana.

His name was also used for a snail which lives in sub-Antarctica and is unique because it has no chitin in its shell, and for a rare New Zealand sealion.

Once the flowers are finished, the plant will be covered in black fruit – the genus name Sarcococca comes from the Greek words for ‘fleshy berry’. Birds are said to like the fruit, and the jury is out as to whether they are poisonous to humans. All species of Sarcococca are native to  Asia, particularly China and the Himalayas, and are sometimes used in Chinese Traditional medicine. The Wellcome Institute page mentions that Christmas box contains chemicals which attack the leishmaniasis parasite, at least in vitro, which is interesting as one of the Chinese medicinal uses is to attack parasitic worms. Nothing is new under the sun, it seems.

Dear Readers, you might have thought that I would struggle to find a poem for something called Sarcococca hunteriana var digyna and you’d be right. However, I did find the poem below, which refers to a very closely related plant, with all the characteristics of this week’s subject. The poem is by Maureen Boyle (1961), a Northern Irish poet with a fine eye for the natural world. To see more of her work, have a look here, you won’t be disappointed.

Christmas Box by Maureen Boyle

There is honey and chocolate on our doorstep
since Christmas—sweet box and coral flower—
one on either side. The heuchera with ruffled
cocoa-coloured leaves hunkers in the corner but
the sarcococca or sweet box is where we step
inside by design so that on nights as dark as winter
and full of storm we brush the bluff, squat, shrub
and boots and coat trail the scent of summer
into the hall. Its flowers are what are left of flowers,
petals blown away—spindly threads ghostly in the leaves,
the odd early blood-berry that follows.
Its genus confusa is right—from so frail a bloom
a scent so big, as if the bees have nested in it
and are eager for their flight. 

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Imranashraf2882008 – File:Shounter valley.JPG, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40388929

Photo Two by By Alice Gadea, Pierre Le Pogam, Grichka Biver, Joël Boustie, Anne-Cécile Le Lamer, Françoise Le Dévéhat & Maryvonne Charrier – Gadea, A., Le Pogam, P., Biver, G., Boustie, J., Le Lamer, A. C., Le Dévéhat, F., & Charrier, M. (2017). Which Specialized Metabolites Does the Native Subantarctic Gastropod Notodiscus hookeri Extract from the Consumption of the Lichens Usnea taylorii and Pseudocyphellaria crocata?. Molecules, 22(3): 425. doi:10.3390/molecules22030425 Figure 8A, crooped., CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64153076

Photo Three by By Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4397600

A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren. 

Dear Readers, since I wrote this I have had yet another attempt to grow winter aconites in the garden, and yet again not a sausage. Could it be the squirrels? I know they love crocuses but these corms are very different. Or maybe it’s the clay soil, though I am mulching and trying to improve it a bit every year. Unlike tulips or daffodils, there are few cultivars, but I rather like the one in the photo below, with its pale apricot flowers.

But it’s the idea of a carpet of yellow winter aconites, white snowdrops and maybe pale pink cyclamen coum that really floats my boat. Maybe I’ll have to give it another go.

And now, let’s see what else I’ve found out about winter aconite…

Dear Readers, how I love winter aconites! Their butter-yellow flowers above the Tudor ruff of leaves always cheers me up. Alas, as my original Wednesday Weed post from 2017 shows, I have not had a lot of success in growing them in the garden, but nonetheless they are often found in cemeteries and churchyards, naturalising amongst the snowdrops in a delicious way.

In her piece on the plant, Rowan Jaines points out how the winter aconite was really popularised by Capability Brown, who planted great swathes of the plant in his landscape designs, so that there was something bright to look at all year round. You can see some flowering through the snow at Compton Verney, where the gardens were designed by Capability Brown, or at Audley End. Interestingly, Jaines mentions how although winter aconite originally came from France and Central Europe back in the late 15th Century it, like the snowdrop, have become regarded as an essential part of England, incorporated into our whole idea of what an early spring English garden should look like. We sometimes forget, I think, how managed and human-influenced practically everything in this country is, with nowhere that has been untouched by human hand.

Winter aconite has been through a fine list of name-changes. First known as winter wolfsbane, because its leaves and seeds were thought to resemble those of the poisonous wolfsbane (better known to us as monkshood), it was then thought to be a hellebore, and finally became a winter aconite after Richard Salisbury, an unorthodox botanist who spent most of his career arguing with Linnaeus about his plant classification, named it Eranthis hyemalis in 1807. The name was only accepted by the botanical community sixty years later.

Incidentally, the name Eranthis hyemalis is a kind of Latin/Greek mash-up, meaning literally ‘spring-flowering winter flower’. Confusion reigns!

And now, let’s pop back to 2017 when I did my original blog on the plant. Don’t miss the poem at the end.

Dear Readers, last year I decided to finally get my act together and plant some woodland bulbs. With the help of my husband I planted snowdrops and cyclamen, lily of the valley and bluebells, and some winter aconite. I had been hoping for a carpet of spring colour. Instead, I have exactly two winter aconites, and a small early crop of stinging nettles. Whether the squirrels have had the lot or they’re just late is anybody’s guess. So I was particularly pleased to spot this fine collection of yellow beauties in a church yard in Camden, not far from Regent’s Park.

Winter aconites are a member of the buttercup family, but they always remind me of tiny saffron waterlilies. In Suffolk (where they seem to be particularly abundant) they are known as ‘choirboys’ because the ruff of leaves rather resembles the neckline of a choirboy’s costume.  The plant came originally from southern Europe and was apparently first introduced to the UK in 1596. By 1838 they were recorded in the wild, and are now seen in churchyards and verges, usually close to human habitation. However, there is a legend that winter aconites only grow where the blood of Roman soldiers was spilled, which implies that either the plants are time-travellers, or they were here a lot earlier than their documented first appearance. This Roman connection was a source of inspiration for the crime novelist Dorothy L.Sayers, who moved close to a Roman camp at Bluntisham, near Cambridge when she was a little girl, and was delighted by the winter aconites. When her father told her the story, her interest in ancient Rome was triggered. Although better known for her Sir Peter Wimsey detective novels, she became something of a classicist, and would explore this in her non-fiction work ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’, which advocated a return to the skills of logic, grammar and rhetoric. I can’t help wondering if, with the current level of political argument, she might have had a point.

Winter aconites are not actually members of the Aconite family but on the ever-informative Poison Garden website, John Robertson explains that the leaves look like those of the true aconites. This might also be why the plant has a reputation for being poisonous: all buttercups are poisonous to a degree, but true aconites, such as Monkshood (Aconitum napellus) are among the most toxic plants in the garden. I have only been able to find two documented cases of death through winter aconite poisoning, The first was an elderly German dachshund with a history of plant ingestion. The other is from the Plant Lives website, and mentions the death, in 1822, of the unfortunate Mrs Gorst, who is said to have  harvested winter aconite tubers after mistaking them for horseradish. Suffice it to say that eating decorative garden plants is never a great idea for any creature, human or otherwise.

As one of the earliest flowering of all  bulbs, winter aconite is a real boon in a woodland garden (or would be if it actually grew). They are known as spring ephemerals, because they take advantage of the light that filters through to the forest floor before the foliage appears on the trees, and disappear later in the year. In this, they mimic their close relative, the lesser celandine. Even snow does not deter the winter aconite. For the rest of the year, the plant hides beneath the leaf litter as a bulb, waiting for its moment of glory when everything else is still dormant.

Winter aconite has inspired a number of artists, including Sir Stanley Spencer, more famous for his figurative paintings involving his home village of Cookham. Here is a painting that he made on commission for the wife of the local vicar, the Reverend Canon Westropp. It was sold at Bonhams in 2013 for £51,650, and I suspect that this might have been a bargain. Spencer had always made studies of local flora to include in his landscape paintings, but the floral paintings were small and sold well. Spencer worked on some of these paintings between his more famous works, and seems to have taken a great deal of care over them: he commented that one of his plant pictures, ‘Magnolias’, was ‘as good as anything that I’ve ever done’. There is certainly a lot of love in ‘Winter Aconites’, painted in 1957, towards the end of Spencer’s life (he died in 1959).

And I would like to finish with a poem, because that’s always a good way to finish in my experience. The poet Freda Downie, who died in 1993, was born in Shooter’s Hill, evacuated to Northamptonshire, returned to London in time for the Blitz, left when it finished and with impeccable timing was brought back to London in time for the V1 and V2 rockets. I love her poem Aconites, which feels just right for this time of the year, and even mentions a blackbird.

“Winter holds fast,
But a little warmth escapes like sand
Through the closed fingers.
The error is annual and certain,
Letting the pygmy flowers
Make their prompt appearance
Under creaking trees.
They stand with serious faces, green ruffled,
As prim as Tudor portraits.


In the west
The greys and gleam slide in the wind
And only the descended blackbird
Augments the intrepid yellow.”

Photo Credits

Photo One (Winter Aconites by Stanley Spencer) https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/20776/lot/69/

Freda Downie’s poem was published on the Greentapestry website here

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

Dear Readers, I was tempted to  call this piece ‘a tale of two hyacinths’ because while the white ones are developing slowly and with some measure of decorum, the blue ones barely pushed above the bulb before flowering and subsiding. Hah! The white ones do have a bit more room, but both have been cared for lovingly – a drop of water but not too much, a cool-ish kitchen etc etc. There’s no accounting for plants. Maybe I should have stroked them 🙂

In other news, I am seeing lots of new hyacinth varieties: there are double-flowered ones…

…black ones…

..and a hollyhock-flowered one.

But am I alone in preferring the white or blue ones? I think they have the best scent as well. And they always remind me of my Dad, as you’ll see in the pieces below…

Dear Readers, as you’ll read below, my Dad always used to plant up some pots with hyacinth bulbs as Christmas presents for his sisters and friends, and every year I start off full of plans to do the same. Alas, Christmas arrives and there are no bulbs planted, though I do usually treat myself to some pre-planted ones. I remember popping out to the shed as a child to see the green tips of the hyacinth leaves just appearing from the purple bulbs. Dad always said that you had to keep them in the cold for as long as you dared, so that they didn’t grow too quickly and topple over under the weight of those huge flowers. He was also always delighted at all the money he’d saved whenever we saw those pots of hyacinths in Marks and Spencer or Tesco.

“But how about the time it took you to look after them, Dad?” I’d ask.

“Time well spent”, he’d say. And now. of course, I realise that he was right. Nothing beats spending time doing something that you love, especially where other people will love the results.

Why do we allow ourselves such little time to do the things that bring us joy, I wonder? Or is it just me? I know that time spent reading, or pottering in the garden, or knitting, or cooking, will help to fill up my heart, but even now I’m retired these things still feel as if they’re relegated to the margins after all the ‘hard stuff’ is done. And sometimes after the ‘hard stuff’ I don’t have the energy for the joyful stuff. Silly old me. Accountability seems to be important for me to get stuff done, which is why so often I make things for other people, and is also a big factor in the blog – I love to do it, and the fact that some people will notice if I don’t blog means that I have to make time to notice something and write about it every single day.

And so, for next year, maybe I need to make a list of people who would love a pot of hyacinths for Christmas, and get planting. I can hear my Dad chuckling as I write this – he’d just have done it, without any overthinking. But then, us overthinkers sometimes need a bit of organisation, and the end results will hopefully be the same. Plus, I never feel closer to my Dad than when I’m pricking out seedlings or planting up bulbs. And 5th December would have been Dad’s 89th birthday, if he’d lived, so celebrating  one of his favourite flowers feels well-timed.

Now, let’s see what I said about hyacinths back in 2018.

Dear Readers, when it comes to the scent of flowers I am very particular. I find that jasmine is ok outdoors, but nauseating at close quarters. Lilies have a kind of waxy scent, redolent of decay, that doesn’t work for me either (plus the pollen is poisonous to cats). I adore freesias, but they have such short lives as cut flowers that I rarely buy them. But hyacinths have the kind of perfume that makes me want to inhale great lungfuls of perfume.

For years, Dad would plant up pots full of hyacinth bulbs for forcing. In recent years, he hasn’t been well enough, so I’ve bought some ready-planted ones for him. When they’re finished, he asks the lady who looks after the garden to plant them outdoors, and so the borders are punctuated with blues and pinks and whites. The blooms are never as spectacular as in the first year, but they are still very fine, and on a still day they bring me up short with their delicious scent. It seems as if the plants revert to their natural type in their later years, as seen in the photo of the hyacinth taken in the wild below.

Hyacinths are native to the Eastern Mediterranean, and are members of the Scilla family. Most scillas are much smaller, more modest plants, although they can be startlingly blue.

Hyacinths were introduced to Western Europe in the 16th Century and, as with all things bulb-related, the Dutch became masters of breeding different cultivars. In the wild, the flowers are largely blue, with occasional white and pink plants. By the 18th Century the Dutch had bred over 2000 different varieties, and the colours available now include yellow, orange, and apricot. I definitely prefer the original blue hyacinth, and I think it has the most delightful scent of all, with the white-flowered hyacinth a close second.

On the subject of blue hyacinths, the word ‘Persenche’ means ‘hyacinth-blue’, and is formed of 73% ultramarine, 9% red and 18% white. So now you know.

You might expect a plant with such a strong scent to be attractive to parfumiers, and so it proved. Madame de Pompadour was an early advocate for the plant in France, and soon every titled lady was stuffing hyacinth flowers down her cleavage to surround herself with a sweet-smelling cloud. It takes 6000kg of hyacinth flowers to make a single litre of hyacinth perfume, and so it was a premium product until the days of synthetic perfumes. Strangely, as with freesias and bluebells, I have never found a convincing man-made scent that comes anywhere near the complexity of the flower.

Hyacinths are mentioned in the Iliad, as part of the eruption of flowers that sprang up to provide a bed for Zeus and Hera:

‘Therewith the son of Cronos clasped his wife in his arms, and beneath them the divine earth made fresh-sprung grass to grow, and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft, that upbare them from the ground. [350] Therein lay the twain, and were clothed about with a cloud, fair and golden, wherefrom fell drops of glistering dew.’

Well, it’s alright for some, that’s all I can say. All that the divine earth ever makes for me in such outdoor encounters is a fine selection of wood ants and irritated mosquitoes, but let’s draw a veil over the whole subject while there’s still time.

In Greek mythology, Hyacinthus was a young man admired by both Apollo and the god Zephyr. Hyacinthus and Apollo were playing with a discus, rather like chaps play with a frisbee I suspect (although with fewer clothes). Zephyr was the god of the West Wind, and was disgruntled that Apollo was spending time with his favourite. When Apollo threw the discus, Zephyr blew it off course so that the unfortunate Hyacinthus was clunked on the noddle by a flying discus.  Being beloved by the gods was something of a liability, I fear. A chastened Apollo created the hyacinth flower from the drops of blood shed by Hyacinthus, though there are only a few daffodils in the picture below, which means the artist missed an opportunity in my opinion.

Hyacinth bulbs (rather than the leaves and flowers) are toxic, particularly to dogs if they dig the bulbs up and eat them. Most cats are much too sensible to eat a hyacinth.  The big danger for humans is if the bulbs are mistaken for onions, but this is much less likely to happen than with daffodils, where the brown papery covering makes for a much closer appearance.

On the subject of hyacinth folklore, I find that in Shropshire it’s considered unlucky to have white hyacinths in the house, as they are emblematic of death. In the course of four years of preparing this blog, I have discovered that almost every plant that I write about is not allowed in the house for fear of someone dying. I suspect that often it’s because the flowers have featured at a funeral and are now inextricably linked with those sad memories. It seems a shame, though. Flowers, especially early-flowering ones like these, can bring such cheer in the early spring.

Hyacinths have long been associated with the Nowruz (New Year) celebrations in Iran, and are often placed on the Haft-Sin table, which contains 7 symbolic items all beginning with the Persian letter Seen (‘S’):

• Greenery (سبزه – sabze): Wheat, barley or lentil sprouts grown in a dish
• Samanu (سمنو – samanu): A sweet pudding made from germinated wheat
• The dried fruit of the oleaster tree (سنجد – senjed)
• Garlic (سیر – sir)
• Apples (سیب – sib)
• Sumac berries (سماق – somāq)
• Vinegar (سرکه – serke)

Other items include a holy book (usually the Quran), books of Persian poetry, candles, a goldfish in a bowl, decorated eggs for each member of the family and a mirror.

Nowruz usually occurs on March 21st, the Vernal Equinox, and I can see how the hyacinth would add its beauty and scent to the occasion. Plus, it’s an opportunity for baklava, the world’s sweetest dessert.

As I watched the hyacinths earlier this week, I was delighted to see that, even though the flowers were almost finished they were still being visited by hairy-footed flower bees, particularly the males, who look as if they’ve been dabbed on the forehead with Tippex. I was also delighted to find out that hyacinth seeds are are dispersed by ants, in a delightful practice called myrmecochory. Hyacinth seeds are attached to a nutrient-rich outgrowth called an eliasome. The ants take the seeds back to their nests and eat the eliasome, but the seed is unharmed and either germinates in the midden of the ant nest, or is carried outside, where it can germinate away from its parent plant. I find it fascinating that this behaviour has evolved to the mutual benefit of ant and hyacinth, and it is much more widespread than I appreciated – over 3,000 species of plants rely on ants to distribute their seeds, and it is a major method of dispersal in both the South African fynbos (where it’s used by 1000 species of plant) and in many Australian habitats, both of which have largely infertile soils. Using an insect to carry the seed away from the parent plant (who might have just enough nutrients to survive itself) is one of those evolutionary marvels that makes my head spin.

So, what is left to say about hyacinths? Like snowdrops and bluebells, they seem so hopeful, spilling their perfume into the cold air. I know, even now, that whenever I smell them I will see my father, tucking the white bulbs into the brown earth and popping them away in the shed for a few months, until it’s time to bring them out to brighten the last days of winter.The Persian poet Sadi (1184-1292 apparently, which would make him 106 years old) had this to say about the joy of hyacinths, and I agree. Feeding the soul is almost as important as feeding the body.

 

Photo Credits

Photo One by Kurt Stüber [1] – caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of http://www.biolib.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3792

Photo Two by By Heike Löchel – fotografiert von Heike Löchel, CC BY-SA 2.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3703102

Photo Three by By John O’Neill – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=459050

Photo Four by By Jean Broc – http://exitinterview.biz/rarities/paidika/n12/pdk12ill.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62

Photo Five by By Mandana asadi – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67619983

Photo Six by By Kultigin – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=905058

Dear Readers, I’ve written about hazel a couple of times before (see below), and so today I wandered out into the garden to see if there were any catkins on the hazel in my hedge. Not a single one! And yet for me, these ‘lambs tails’ shivering in an icy breeze are a sign that spring can’t be far away. I have no idea why I don’t have catkins as the hedge hasn’t been trimmed for ages – maybe like a ‘mast’ year with other trees, it only flowers when it feels the conditions are right. Are you spotting hazel catkins yet in your part of the world?

And for the fungi lovers amongst us, I note that hazel is the sole host for the Rubber Glove Fungus (Hypocreopsis rhododendri) in the UK, where it grows on the west coast of Scotland and Ireland. Interestingly, it’s also found in the Appalachian Mountains of the US, where it grows exclusively on native rhododendrons, hence the scientific name.

And now for a poem, and a bit more on the hazel.

Dear Readers, when I was writing my garden update yesterday, I suddenly wondered if I had ever done a ‘Wednesday Weed’ on hazel, and indeed I had, back in 2015. I remember wandering the streets of East Finchley on a cold and blustery day, and wondering what on earth I was going to write about, when suddenly I noticed the catkins outside Martin School. Writing this blog has really reminded me to pay attention, even on the most unpromising of days.

We are just coming up to the busiest time of the year at work, when it feels like nothing but deadlines, but I am reminded that nature is going on all around us all the time. And because I love it, here is my favourite hazel poem. I always wondered what an Aengus was, but according to the interwebs, Aengus was the god of love in Irish mythology. Yeats himself described the poem as “the kind of poem I like best myself—a ballad that gradually lifts … from circumstantial to purely lyrical writing.”

The Song of Wandering Aengus
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

And now, let’s zip back to 2015 and see what I had to say about hazel back then.

Dear Readers, this week the search for a Wednesday Weed sent me in a completely different direction from my usual route. On a rainy, blustery day, I headed off towards our local primary school, to see if the playing fields there had anything growing that I had not already covered. In vain I peered through the fence at the turf, until my eyes refocused and I realised that I’d been looking at my subject all along. For what is more surprising on a January day than a plant that is already in full flower, ready to reproduce when everything else is still in bed?

The male Hazel catkin has the delightful colour of a sherbet-lemon. With every damp gust, invisible clouds of pollen are released. With any luck, they will be captured on by the red female flowers  who wait with open arms, a little like sea anemones.

It is these female flowers that will eventually turn into hazelnuts. They will promptly be nibbled off by squirrels or, if we are extremely lucky, by dormice. Kentish Cobnuts, with their creamy white interiors and little hats of pale green, are a domesticated variety of the hazelnut, but the wild variety is perfectly good to eat, and was, indeed, one of the staple foods of prehistoric peoples. Hazel has grown in the UK for at least the last 6000 years, and only birch was quicker to colonise the country after the last Ice Age. The spread of the plant throughout Europe has been attributed to its being carried from place to place by humans. After all, nuts are a concentrated, portable form of protein and carbohydrate. What better food if you’re embarking on a (very) long walk?

The Hazel growing beside the school playing fields has turned itself into a small tree, but historically it is much coppiced, the stems being used for a wide variety of purposes. They are extremely flexible, and can be turned back upon themselves or knotted. They were woven together to form both hurdles and fences, and were also used as the framework for wattle and daub walls. They are still used in thatching, to hold the thatch down, because the hazel stems can be bent through 180 degrees. A more modern use is in the creation of sound screens alongside motorways.

A plant which has lived alongside us in these islands since the very beginning, Hazel has many associations with Druid and Celtic beliefs. Its stems have been used for water divination, and for the making of shepherds’ crooks and pilgrims’ staffs. A Hazel tree was believed to be the home of Bile Ratha, the poetic fairy of Irish folklore, and it was believed that eating hazelnuts would bestow wisdom. On Dartmoor, Hazel was said to be the cure for snake and dog bites. And, to prevent toothache, you simply have to carry a double-hazelnut in your pocket at all times.

The catkins are shivering in the wintry blast, and so am I. Parents are tearing past me in their cars, hurrying to pick their children up from the school gate and giving me a decidedly funny look as I stand in the rain, peering through the fence with my camera.  I wonder if any of the children will get the chance to admire the catkins, the first sign that the long dark is finally loosening its grip. I hope that someone will take the time to show the little ones the ‘lambs tails’, and explain to them about this plant. After all, we have been living together, side by side, for six thousand years.

Dear Readers, I am currently in a race with my dear friend J to see whose Amaryllis will flower first – I used to do this with my Dad, as you’ll see below, and though it’s sad that Dad’s not around to be competitive with it feels good to carry on the tradition. The Amaryllis is positioned in a spot in the kitchen which I hope is cat-proof (there is some debate about whether Amaryllis pollen is poisonous to cats but I’d rather not take any chances). Yesterday, though, the foster kitties had found a loaf of bread, gnawed on it and knocked it on the floor. I do feed them, you know! Anyhow, here’s the Amaryllis at the moment, doing not very much. It is going to be bright orange when it does arrive – I’m amazed at the new colours that are being developed!

And incidentally, I cannot believe the speed with which Christmas has arrived this year. My Mum used to say that time speeded up as you got older, and now I know what she meant. However, my time in Namibia was so stimulating that the days seemed much longer than usual, in a good way, so my resolution for next year is to try to do more new things. The theory is that time seems long when you’re a child because everything is new, whereas for us tired old adults it can feel like every day is the same. I imagine that’s why I love doing this blog – I have to notice something new every day, otherwise I won’t have anything to share. Highly recommended!

Anyhoo, let’s see what I found out about Amaryllis back in 2018.

Dear Readers, whenever I see an amaryllis I always think of my Dad. His Christmas presents always contain at least one rectangular box containing an enormous amaryllis bulb and a pot, and sometimes I get one too. Then our phone conversations for the next month or so are mildly competitive.

‘Mine is about three feet high!’

‘Mine is so big that it keeps falling over!’

‘Mine has flowers the size of a baby’s head!’

‘MIne’s got flowers the size of a cabbage’.

Dad and I love to cross swords. If we are watching ‘Pointless’, the room echoes to a chorus of answers to Alexander Armstrong’s questions. For a while I was winning, but then, after Dad got his cataracts done, we realised that it was only because he couldn’t actually see what the questions were. Hah! These days we are neck and neck. Or maybe Dad’s slightly in front.

Anyhow, the amaryllis is a most bold and ostentatious plant. In my opinion there is no more spectacular indoor bulb. You can practically watch it growing. For a while it’s rather embarrassing to anyone with Victorian sensibilities, as it looks like a giant Martian willy. I almost feel that i should be covering it up with a lace curtain. And then the blooms form and start to open, and it seems impossible that there should be so much volume of petal in that little crumpled bud, but there it is. This year, my amaryllis is dark red, with petals that are simultaneously as sleek as satin and as plush as velvet. It is utterly glorious.

It’s important to clear up exactly what this plant is, however. The bulbs that we grow at home are not actually amaryllis (this name refers to some South African plants) but are from a separate genus known as Hippeastrum, which hales from Central and South America and the Caribbean. The name was given to the plant by William Herbert, a 19th century botanist and illustrator, and means ‘horse star lily’, for reasons which have faded into obscurity. There are 90 separate species of Hippeastrum and over 600 hybrids and cultivars, with new varieties being offered every Christmas – over the past few years Dad and I have competed with pale-green, stripey red and scarlet varieties. The original Hippeastrum species are normally red, pink or purple in colour.

The leaves on a Hippeastrum appear after the flowers, which is one reason why the developing buds look so extraordinary. The sexual organs of the plant, the stamens and pistil, are long and elegant. The pollen is plentiful but is poisonous to cats, so be careful if you have any moggie companions. As with lilies, the danger is that the pollen comes into contact with the fur and is licked off by the cat during grooming. The bulbs of some Caribbean species of Hippeastrum are used to produce arrow poison, so this is obviously not a plant to be messed with.

I have never yet managed to persuade my Hippeastrum to bloom for more than one year, but then I have been doing it All Wrong. The leaves should be allowed to develop, and the plant given some food on a weekly basis during this time, but then it will need two months ‘rest’ in the cold and dark, without food or water (and preferably with no nibbling by any rodents that may be living in the shed). Then the plant can be brought out into the light and watering re-commenced. The plant should be in a small pot, not much bigger than the circumference of the bulb,  with a good third of the bulb above the surface of the compost. This can make the plant very top heavy, of course, hence the occasional catastrophe when the whole lot falls over and the main stem breaks under its own weight. I can only imagine that the Hippeastrum that grow wild are rather less exaggerated in form, much as a fox stands more chance of survival in the wild than a pug would.

Incidentally, a properly cared-for Hippeastrum can live for 75 years so I really have no excuse.

One thing that  I don’t associate with Hippeastrum is perfume, but apparently there are some scented varieties. The gene for scent is recessive, and is associated only with white or pastel coloured plants – I’ve never grown a perfumed one, but do let me know if you have, I am curious as to what it smells like. Sadly, the English language is very short on words to describe scent, probably reflecting our rather inadequate noses. If dogs could speak I imagine they’d have a very varied perfume vocabulary.

Medicinally, Hippeastrums contain over 64 alkaloid compounds, which as we have already noted are poisonous, but which are also anti-parasitic and have psychopharmaceutical properties. Some species of Hippeastrum seem to have interesting anti-depressant and anti-convulsant possibilities, and experimentation has indicated that the bulb may have possible uses as an antibiotic.

Just to return to the name ‘Amaryllis’ for a moment – Amaryllis was a Greek nymph who suffered with unrequited love for the cold-hearted Alteo. In a paroxysm of passion she pierced her heart with a golden arrow and trekked to his door every day for a month, leaving a path of blood splatters en route. These days we would probably call this behaviour stalking, but on the thirtieth day the blood spots transmogrified into red flowers of stupendous size and hue. Alteo finally fell in love with Amaryllis, her heart was healed, and the Dutch bulb trade lurched into action. The rest, my friends, is history.

You might expect that such a showy plant would inspire visual artists and, before he turned to abstraction, Piet Mondrian produced a number of startling ‘portraits’ of Hippeastrum.

And you might also expect that the amaryllis/Hippeastrum would invite the attention of poets, and so it does. I adore this poem by American poet Deborah Digges, who died in 2009 and who sounds like a most generous teacher of other poets. She explores both the beauty and the absurdity of the amaryllis, a plant which, in its super-abundance, teeters on the very edge of ‘too much’.

My Amaryllis

by Deborah Digges

 

So this is the day the fat boy learns to take the jokes

by donning funny hats, my Amaryllis,

my buffoon of a flower,

your four white bullhorn blossoms like the sirens

in a stadium through which the dictator announces he’s in love.

Then he sends out across the land a proclamation—

there must be music, there must be stays of execution

for the already dying.

That’s how your pulpy sex undoes me and your seven

leaves, unsheathed. How you diminish

my winter windows, and beyond them, the Atlantic.

How you turn my greed ridiculous.

Now it’s as if I could believe in having children after forty,

or, walking these icy streets, greet sullen strangers

like a host of former selves, so ask them in, of course,

and listen like one forgiven to their crimes.

Dance with us and all our secrets,

dance with us until our lies,

like death squads sent to an empty house, put down,

finally, their weapons, peruse the family

portraits, admire genuinely the bride.

Stay with me in this my exile

or my returning, as if to love the tyrant one more time.

O my lily, my executioner, a little stooped, here,

listing, you are the future bending

to kiss the present like a sleeping child.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Averater – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47076787

Photo Two by By Daniel Macher – AmaryllisUploaded by Epibase, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8933832

Photo Three by Pictures taken by Raul654 around Washington DC on May 7, 2005.