Dear Readers, those of us who live in London are pretty familiar with London Plane (Platanus x hispanica) trees – they’re pretty much everywhere, and very fine they are too. But it’s easy to miss the Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) – I found several in East Finchley Cemetery at the weekend, and was struck by how elegant they look. It isn’t actually ‘oriental’ in the sense of being from the Orient – its native range is from Italy through the Caucasus to Iran, though it is a large and handsome tree which has been transported all over the world. At its largest, it can have a diameter at breast height of 5 metres, which makes it a very chunky tree indeed.

Oriental Plane is one of the parents of London plane, along with its western counterpart, the American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis).

The timber of Oriental Plane is also known as lacewood, but perhaps most intriguing is the use of the leaves of the tree for leaf carving, a relatively new art form that originated in China. You can see some examples here . They look as if they would take endless patience.

In India, the Oriental Plane is known as Chinar, and is associated with the Hindu goddess Bhavani. In Kashmir there has been a recent ban on cutting the trees down, and they are now registered and considered the property of the state.

But here in the UK there are a number of exceptional Oriental Plane trees, including one, in Corsham Court in Wiltshire, which was planted by Capability Brown in 1760. It now has the title of ‘the most spreading tree in the UK’. It takes up an area equivalent to the size of a football pitch.

The Pococke tree, an Oriental Plane planted in the gardens of Christ Church, Oxford in 1636, was thought to be the inspiration for the monster in ‘Jabberwocky’

Now, recently I have developed a bit of a passion for the music of Handel, so I couldn’t leave the subject of this tree without mentioning Handel’s ‘Largo’ (Ombra mai fu) from the opera Serse, based on the story of the Persian emperor Xerxes. In the aria, Xerxes praises the plane tree for its shade:

‘Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.

Never was a shade
of any plant
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.

And here it is, in all its glory. For those of you with a classical inclination, the opera is being performed at the Barbican on June 19th (I will be there, gentle readers, and will report back). Enjoy!

Traditionally, the aria would have been sung by a castrato, but here’s  countertenor Valer Sabadus, doing a pretty good job I think….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbfGLpDdXPY

and here is Cécilia Bartoli. See which you prefer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdeOyrLHdSg

Dear Readers, I have a great fondness for Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium) – I mentioned its use for headaches in my original post, but it’s so attractive, with its daisy flowers and bright green leaves. I always wonder what turns some plants from ‘weeds’ into ‘wildflowers’ or even ‘garden plants’, while some remain resolutely ‘weeds’ in most people’s minds. When I visited the garden centre last week I was amazed to see pots of trailing bellflower on sale, even though they are growing wild everywhere on the streets of East Finchley. Maybe one day Feverfew will make the jump, but clearly not yet. However, ironically it was probably first brought to the UK from the Balkan peninsula as an ornamental – it was first recorded in the wild in 995 CE, so I think we can consider it well-established.

The name ‘Feverfew’ refers to the belief that, if planted around buildings (especially during times of plague), the plant purified the air and put fevers to flight, a rather lovely idea, however inaccurate. The genus name ‘Tanacetum‘ means ‘immortality’ – the leaves of the closely-related Tansy were placed in the shrouds of the dead to deter vermin. The flowers of Feverfew are also thought to act as an insecticide, if dried and then steeped in water. Feverfew also protected against ‘elf-shot’ – if a mischievous elf took against a person or animal, they would shoot them with invisible arrows which caused extreme pain, such as that caused by a ‘stitch’ or arthritis. The spear-shaped leaves were thought to indicate that the plant would protect against such attacks.

The plant doesn’t seem a very likely candidate for edibility, but the flowers are used for herbal tea.In German, Feverfew is ‘Mutterkraut’ and was said to speed up labour – in sufficient  quantities it was even thought to be an abortifacient.  In the Veneto, where Feverfew is known as ‘erba madre’, it’s made into a cake (though the side effects of the plant mean that anyone who is pregnant shouldn’t be eating it). Recipe here for the non-gravid!

And here’s a poem. It’s tangential, but I loved it too much not to share it. Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848), the sister of the better known (of course!) William Herschel was the first professional woman astronomer, and the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist. However, she caught typhoid as a child, and grew to only 4 foot 3 inches tall – she was thought to  be destined to be a household servant, but moved to Bath after her father’s death, where she became a renowned singer (appearing in Handel’s ‘Messiah’) and later becoming an astronomer who discovered several comets. We don’t know if Feverfew was used in her treatment for typhoid, but she survived the disease, and became a truly remarkable woman. For the full breadth of her life, have a look at the Wikipedia entry here.

And here’s the poem, by Irish poet Rosamund Taylor. I think it’s absolutely stunning, see what you think…

On Surviving Typhoid Fever by Rosamund Taylor

In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded a gold medal to Caroline Herschel. No woman would receive one again for 168 years.

My mother can’t forgive me for being alive.
The typhoid made me stooped, legs short,
never to be wed, but my hands are quick,
my voice strong, and I look up as I walk icy streets –

I may trip over frozen excrement
or sighing heaps of rags but I remember my brother’s
hand in mine as he said, look at the planets,
that’s Jupiter, and there’s Mars, there

among those constellations. I imagine walking
with the Seven Sisters, their bright cold hands,
meeting Orion, his gruff laugh, his belt looped
around my waist. All fancy, of course –

my mother says I read too many books
but I can’t resist the articles my brother sends,
solar winds and stars, telescopes, the geography
of Mars. I dream them, though I don’t sleep much:

at five I pull myself from warmth to break flinty ice
on the water buckets, begin bread, wake my mother
with hot milk. She pinches me. I won’t squeak –
she likes it when I do. Instead I begin

my piece-work, each stitch made with raw fingers,
rubbed stiff. I’m paying her back for my illness,
the days I spent in bed, the man I cannot wed,
the woman I cannot be. My mother won’t forgive me

for being alive, but I sing to myself, my clear soprano,
I put celestial distances to familiar tunes, whisper
names of Martian canals, of Jupiter’s moons.
In my head the whole scope of the sky.

And here’s my original Feverfew post, from (gulp) 2014….

I am delighted to have spotted this plant at the corner of the workshop at the end of my road. Flowering away, minding its own business, is the plant that has been described as the ‘aspirin of the medieval world’. Feverfew, as its name suggests, was used for all kinds of colds, coughs and infections, and for general aches and pains. Even more excitingly, it has been proved to be extremely efficacious in the treatment of migraine, In a study of 270 migraine-sufferers, over seventy percent reported that their symptoms were significantly decreased after nibbling only one leaf a day for three months, whilst a third seemed to have eradicated their attacks altogether. If only I had known about this when I was growing up – my mother suffered from terrible, debilitating migraines, and it would have been interesting to see if this common, overlooked little plant would have helped her.

Even if it wasn’t so medicinally useful, this would be a welcome plant – it has a sunny, cheerful aspect, and certainly brightens up the rather prosaic corner of this small industrial site. As I stood on the pavement in my fluffy slippers, taking some photos, I was a source of some amazement to the workmen coming and going. One of them stopped, looked at me, looked at the plant and ruminated on what would be an appropriate comment. Eventually, it came.

‘It took us ages to grow that, you know’, he said, with the jolly sarcasm of the North London Geezer. I patted him on the arm.

‘You did a lovely job’, I said.

 

 

Dear Readers, this year my wildflower turf is giving me lots of sorrel (and red campion), so here’s a few thoughts on the plant, and all the creatures that eat it (including us). Plus a poem by Edna St Vincent Millay, my favourite sourpuss…

Dear Readers, what an unassuming little plant this is! if you weren’t paying attention you could easily miss it. This is sorrel (Rumex acetosa). Sorrel looks like a grass, but isn’t one. It’s a member of the Polygonaceae or knotgrass family, along with the various persicarias and bistorts and our old friend, Japanese knotweed. The zesty leaves have been eaten throughout the plant’s range, which includes Scandinavia, the rest of Europe and parts of Eurasia. Sorrel is used in spanakopita, the Greek feta, leek and greens pie, in Albanian byrek pies and in Armenian aveluk soup, with walnuts and lentils. In Eastern Europe, it’s turned into soup with hard-boiled eggs. In short, sorrel’s lemon-flavoured leaves are much enjoyed in parts of the world where citrus isn’t grown, or at times of the year when lemons aren’t available.

The flavour of the leaves has given rise to a whole range of vernacular names. My Vickery’s Folk Flora (by Roy Vickery) tells me that in northern England sorrel is known as bitterdabs, in Roxburghshire as Lammie sourocks, in Northern Ireland as red sour-leek and in Ross-shire as sourey souracks, which is probably my favourite. It reminds me rather of Boaty McBoatface, the name selected by the public in the UK when asked to suggest a name for a research ship (subsequently named the David Attenborough, which is more appropriate but rather less fun).

Medicinally, Scottish children used to eat the first leaves of sorrel as a cure for their spots, and John Clare describes how workers in the field would nibble on the plant to slake their thirst. It used to be believed that the plant could ward off scurvy:although the flavour comes from oxalic acid rather than ascorbic acid, it contains some Vitamin C, as do all green plants. While the oxalic acid is associated with kidney stones, you’d have to eat prodigious quantities of the plant to do yourself a damage. Plus oxalic acid is also present in foods like rhubarb, and what is the point of life without rhubarb?

Sorrel was also the source of ‘salts of lemons‘, a concentrated compound of the oxalic acid, which could be used to bleach straw, remove rust stains from linen, and remove ink stains. With the last, however, the chemical reaction only worked if the ink was made from oak galls and salts of iron.

It is eaten by various caterpillars, including those of the fiery clearwing (Pyropteron chrysidiformis), the forester moth (Adscita statices) the blood-vein (Timandra comae) and the scarce vapourer (Orgyia recens), all scarce species that it’s well worth encouraging.

Sorrel can also be used as a dye, with either the whole plant or the root being used with various mordants to get a whole range of colours. The dyes in the photo come from sorrel’s close relative sheep’s sorrel (Rumex acetosella) but the results should be broadly the same. Who knew you could get so many colours from such a modest little plant? The photo comes from the Forest and the Spirit blog, which is well worth a look.

And finally, a poem. I love Edna St Vincent Millay, with her streak of cussedness and curmudgeonly attitude. How could I not also love this poem? Why, even the name is appropriate. I’m not exactly sure what the last verse means, so feel free to share!

Weeds by Edna St Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

White with daisies and red with sorrel
And empty, empty under the sky!—
Life is a quest and love a quarrel—
Here is a place for me to lie.

Daisies spring from damnèd seeds,
And this red fire that here I see
Is a worthless crop of crimson weeds,
Cursed by farmers thriftily.

But here, unhated for an hour,
The sorrel runs in ragged flame,
The daisy stands, a bastard flower,
Like flowers that bear an honest name.

And here a while, where no wind brings
The baying of a pack athirst,
May sleep the sleep of blessèd things,
The blood too bright, the brow accurst.

Photo Credits

Photo One By Popo le Chien – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69436320

Photo Two by Ferran Pestaña, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three AfroBrazilian, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four by hamon jp, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Five by Ilia Ustyantsev, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Six from https://forestandthespirit.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/plant-dyes-sheep-sorrel/

 

 

 

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

Dear Readers, the Blackthorn has been out for ages here in East Finchley and feels like a true herald of spring, but in Nature’s Calendar, Lulah Ellender describes how the plant has a much darker side: the permission of the fairies had to be asked before any part of Blackthorn was cut or harvested, and it was said to be imbued with evil spirits and prone to cause miscarriage. On the other hand, it was the material of choice for Irish shillelagh – the wood was daubed with butter or buried in manure in order to cure it, and was then placed inside a chimney. Just the thing to give someone a bash on the bonce!

The wood is also the material used for the staff of the ceremonial Black Rod in parliament, who has the door of the House of Commons slammed in their face on Queen’s/King’s Speech day, and is only allowed admittance after striking the door with the staff three times.

Now, let’s have a look at some more personal remembrances of Blackthorn, from 2016…

Dear Readers, what a pleasure it is to see the blackthorn in full flower. The English name of the plant describes it well for anyone uncertain what it looks like – the twigs and branches are black or dark grey, and the plant has thorny side shoots. Each of the flowers has many long, elegant stamens which give the blossom a speckled appearance. Such a mass of flowers is a boon for early insects of all kinds, from hoverflies to honeybees. In some traditions, the signal for the start of Imbolc, the time of Celtic  spring rituals, was the blooming of the blackthorn.

I must confess to a personal attachment to this plant. In its other incarnation as the sloe, blackthorn forms the basis of one of my favourite tipples, sloe gin. My father worked for many years as a distiller for Gordon’s Gin. In those days, the recipe for the gin was a closely guarded secret (the details were held in a locked safe), and only a few people knew how to make up the concentrated flavour that would be used to create the spirit. As a result my father, who left school at fourteen, ended up flying all over the world, working in distilleries in Spain, Jamaica, and in the middle of a jungle in Venezuela. He had many adventures, including being confined to quarters during a State of Emergency in Jamaica, being knocked over by an earthquake in Venezuela, and flying first class with Peter Wyngarde, the diminutive mahogany-toned star of the TV show Jason King. I credit my dad with imbuing me with a love of travel, and the belief that it was possible to  have an interesting and fulfilling life regardless of where you start.

And what has all this to do with blackthorn, I hear you plead? Well, Gordons made a limited number of bottles of sloe gin, which, heavily diluted with lemonade, was one of my first introductions to the delights of alcohol. I still love a glass at Christmas today (though minus the lemonade). It is possible to make the drink at home, though the process involves gathering basketfuls of the astringent purple-blue fruits, and individually pricking every one to allow the juices to colour and flavour the gin that you pour all over them. At Gordon’s, they had a special machine for pricking the sloes, which I believe were harvested in Scotland. And a very fine drink it was too.

The juice from the berries has also been used as a dye – apparently it initially turns cloth a reddish colour, but after several washings this turns to a permanent pale blue.

Humans are not the only creatures with a taste for blackthorn, however. It is a recommended source of food for the caterpillars of the rare Black and Brown Hairstreak butterflies, as well as numerous moths.

The eggs of the brown hairstreak are laid directly onto the stems of the blackthorn, and it’s well worth having a look to see if you can see any next time you are passing by a bush. They are quite distinctive, though at a distance you might mistake them for lichen, or bird droppings. Once the caterpillars emerge, they are extremely well camouflaged and feed only at night.

And for your delectation, here are some of the other insects whose larvae may be found feeding on blackthorn:

As so many creatures depend upon it, it is a good thing that blackthorn has been used as a cattle-proof hedge since at least medieval times. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey describes how crossing the blackthorn with the cultivated plum tree can produce ‘thorns more than two inches long and tough enough to penetrate a tractor tyre’, so I can well see how even the most ambitious cow would admit defeat.

The wood is described by Cobbett as being ‘precisely the colour of the Horse Chestnut fruit and, as smooth and bright, needs no polish’. Blackthorn wood has been used as a material for walking sticks, and was traditionally the wood used for Irish shillelaghs (clubs), because it was less prone to cracking than other materials. The wood was seasoned with lard and put up a chimney to season, which gave it its black colour. The normal weight of the stick was about two pounds, but a ‘seasoned club’ had the hitting end filled with molten lead. You would not want to attempt to mug someone carrying one of these sticks, for sure.

Although it was a rather mild day when I spotted the blackthorn in blossom at the weekend, it is said that the plant may come into flower during a period of bitter winds following a ‘false spring’ – a ‘blackthorn winter’. As with many plants that bear berries, plentiful fruit was also believed to be indicative of a harsh winter to come:

‘many sloes, many cold toes’

The bark has been used as an intestinal tonic, and also for tanning – it turns leather a reddish-brown colour. It seems that this plant, which shares such a long history with us, has been useful to us at every turn.

I like to try to find some artistic or poetic reference to my Wednesday Weed, and this week I have found this portrait by the Pre-Raphaelite Marie Spartali Stillman, arguably the greatest woman artist of the movement. The painting shows the Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni, a character from Dante’s poetry, and she is described as ‘a heartless lady dressed in green’. She is holding a branch of blackthorn, and I wonder what it symbolises: her wintery coldness, her thorny nature, or even her purity? Her enigmatic gaze is giving nothing away. I love that the painting features not only the blackthorn, but that the flowers in the Madonna’s hair are hellebores, and that ivy twines amongst the dried oak leaves above her head.

Spartali Stillman lived in England for her whole life, first in Clapham and then on the Isle of Wight. She studied under Ford Madox Brown (who is buried in ‘my’ cemetery) and was a model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron and Burne-Jones, amongst others. She also had an extensive sixty year career of her own, which included major exhibitions in both the UK and the US. Yet I had never heard of her. It seems that, as so often, a woman’s work is buried in obscurity while her male compatriots are famous names. I am  fortunate to live in an age where such works can be discovered with a simple internet search, uncovering a whole world of beauty that I can share here. It is easy to criticise the web, and yet it enables us to make connections that I cannot imagine would have been so easily made any other way. Who knew that a post on blackthorn would take me so far?

Credits

Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’ and Sue Eland’s ‘Plant Lives‘ website are my constant companions for the Wednesday Weed.

Photo One – By Allan warren – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9982286

Photo Two – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=337699

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

Photo Four – By Hectonichus – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12471724

Photo Five – By Gilles San Martin – Flickr: Thecla betulae egg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15753504

Photo Six – By jean-pierre Hamon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=524340

Photo Seven – By ©entomart, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=294708

Photo Eight – By Donald Hobern – originally posted to Flickr as Esperia oliviella, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5715537

Photo Nine – By Samuraiantiqueworld – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12311379

Photo Ten – By Marie Spartali Stillman – Source 2nd upload: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/484137028666579864/Source 1st upload: http://bertc.com/subone/g94/stillman.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=607536

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

Dear Readers, last year I planted lots of wildflower seeds, in the hope that something interesting would pop up, and this year seems to be the year of Red Campion – there are half a dozen plants, all looking very pink, and attracting the attention of rather a lot of aphids. Let’s hope that the aphid munchers won’t be far behind!

To be honest, I’m amazed that anything  is thriving at the moment – the shed is down, and the slab for the next one is laid, but the remains of everything else (including the eight-foot bamboo that was supposedly ‘contained’ in a trench behind the shed, but which was in fact breaking out in all directions) is strewn about the garden, waiting for a skip. Hey ho. At least my neighbours have plenty of bamboo canes for their allotments.

And now, let’s have a look at my original post about Red Campion, from 2016. Where did those ten years go, I wonder?

Dear Readers, there is a ‘wild’  burial site in the cemetery, close to where I feed the foxes. I love this as an idea – I can think of no nicer place to be interred,. One area has been roped off, and it’s full of ox-eye daisies, grasses, speedwell and the pink flowers of red campion. However, it’s not plain sailing all the way, and it’s clear that there’s more work to be done on some of the other parts of area. Here, for example, are some of the docks. Many of them are so enormous that they actually look down on me, like triffids who are just waiting to pull their roots up before they take over the world.

This is the problem for anyone who tries to set up a wildlife meadow. In ‘real life’, these would be mowed regularly, to gather in the hay and to prevent the perennials (like the docks and sow thistles and bindweed) from setting seed. If this is neglected, within a year or two what you have is not a meadow, but scrub, and all the biodiversity disappears. On the other hand, I did see this very splendid red dock weevil, but I think he will need lots of little friends to cope with the sheer volume of dock leaves.

Anyhow, back to the red campion. This is a native plant, and a member of the Caryophyllaceae, the same family that includes chickweeds, stitchworts and pinks. The petals are very deeply notched, and the flowers always look to me like gears from a child’s model engine.

The Latin species name ‘dioica’ indicates that, as with annual mercury, the male and female plants are separate. The male flowers have ten stamen (though some might be buried within the capsule of the plant at any given time), and the female plants have 5 style (which look like little white hooks). The seed capsule has ten strongly down-curved teeth on the edge. I am currently doing the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s Identiplant course, for which I had to find ten plants and record how many were male and how many female. In my little sample, there were nine males and one female, which makes me wonder a little about whether there is something in the seed mixes used for ‘meadows’ which favours one sex over another, though I have no idea why this should be.

The genus name, Silene, comes from the Greek god Silenus, who was always drunk, and is often depicted swaying atop a long-suffering donkey. Now, the name Silenus is said to come from the Greek word for saliva, implying that Silenus was not only drunk, but drooling. What a delightful picture! However, the link with the Red Campion is that the female flower is said to produce a foam which helps to capture pollen from visiting insects. I have not seen a bloom doing this, but will keep an eye open and see if I can capture such behaviour on camera if I notice it.

Just to complicate matters, red campion contains a substance called saponin, which has been used in soap-making – indeed another member of the family, Soapwort, has historically been used for just this purpose. Maybe this is another reason for the ‘Silene’ Latin genus name.

Red campion has a variety of alternative names, but one that I like is ‘Bachelor’s Buttons’, referring to the way that the plant was worn as a buttonhole by eligible males. However, it was also said to be one of the flowers that children should not pick, as it was associated with the death of parents – on the Plant Lore website, one person reports that the plant was known to them as ‘mother-and-father-die’. On the Isle of Man, red campion is said to be beloved by the fairies, and so it shouldn’t be picked by humans. The plant is also said to be efficacious in the unlikely event (in the UK at any rate) of being threatened by a scorpion: all you have to do it grab a handy red campion and hurl it at the offending arachnid and he or she will scuttle away. Never let it be said that you don’t learn useful things in the Wednesday Weed.

Medicinally, the flowers of red campion have been taken in a glass of wine as a treatment for kidney and liver complaints and internal bleeding. The crushed seeds are also said to be efficacious against snakebite, but on the Plant Lore website mentioned above, one lady, from Wales, said that her grandmother was convinced that a snake would come into the house if she brought a posy of the flowers, so it appears that you can’t win.

You might expect that such a bright-faced spring flower would attract the attention of poets, and you would not be wrong. Mary Howitt (1799 – 1888) was the author of ‘The Spider and the Fly’ (parodied by Lewis Carroll in ‘Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland’ as ‘The Lobster Quadrille). She was a most prolific writer, creating over 180 books, and wrote many poems for children. Among them was ‘Summer Woods’ (you can read the whole poem here, and a fine evocation of the joys of the great outdoors it is too).

 

There are many things to love about Mary Howitt, who had a most full and adventurous life, including relocating to Scandinavia (where she learned Swedish and Danish and proceeded to translate Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales), being friends with the Wordsworths and Charles Dickens,  and meeting the Pope. She was never separated from her husband William, and The Times had this to say about them:

‘Their friends used jokingly to call them William and Mary, and to maintain that they had been crowned together like their royal prototypes. Nothing that either of them wrote will live, but they were so industrious, so disinterested, so amiable, so devoted to the work of spreading good and innocent literature, that their names ought not to disappear unmourned.’

When I read about the lives of Victorians, I am amazed by the fullness of their lives, and the variety of things that they got up to. However, it would be a mistake to think of them as  exceptional. Every person, if listened to in a sympathetic way and asked the right questions, seems to have had an extraordinary life. We rarely think of our lives as in any way unusual, but if we stop to consider the experiences that we’ve had, the people that we’ve met and loved and influenced, the place that we have in our community and in our family, we might be surprised at the richness and complexity of our existence, the extent of our interconnectedness. In a world that seems to view other living things, including human beings, as expendable, it’s worth remembering how precious every single one of us is.

Dear Readers, I was visiting Cherry Tree Wood yesterday, for a chat with my pal Roger about pollinators, when he asked me if I’d noticed the snakeshead fritillaries. What snakeshead fritillaries? I asked. And to my delight, on the way out, I noticed literally hundreds of them, planted in a spot where a derelict pavilion used to be, and doing very nicely.

Snakeshead fritillaries like it damp, so this is an ideal spot, and hopefully they’ll continue to multiply. Do have a look if you’re an East Finchleyite, or just visiting – they are amongst my favourite spring flowers (yes, I know you’re not supposed to have favourites), and will not be around for long.

Now, let’s have a look at my original post, from (gulp) 2016…

Dear Readers, snake’s head fritillary is my favourite spring bulb. I am exceedingly fond of snakes, and so the strange scaly pattern on the purple flowers enthralls me. I love the elegance of the pure white flowers. I love the nodding heads, which only reveal their beauty if you turn them over.

However, it’s fair to say that the plant has an unfortunate reputation. One alternative name was ‘Leper Lily’, as the flowers are said to be the same shape as the bells that lepers had to carry to announce themselves. Vita Sackville-West called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay.’  As with many other flowers of a nodding habit, they were said to be hanging their heads in sorrow at Christ’s crucifixion.

Well, harrumph to all that. The fritillary family contains the only truly chequered flowers that I know (but do remind me of others if you can think of them!) Both parts of the Latin name for snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) refer to this feature: the Fritillaria part refers to either the Latin word for dice (fritillus) or (more likely to my mind) the word frittillo, which means a table for chess-playing (thanks to The Poison Garden website for this insight). This is also the root derivation for the name of the fritillary group of butterflies.

The meleagris species name means ‘spotted like a guineafowl’.

According to my Harraps Wild Flowers book, snake’s head fritillary were first recorded in the UK in 1578 (they are native to mainland Europe and Asia), but were not reported in the wild until 1736. However, there is a view that the plants are actually native, growing originally on the floodplains that extended from the Rhine and included the Thames before the opening up of the North Sea in about 5500 BC. They are now a plant of unimproved meadow which occasionally floods, a vanishingly rare habitat, and are considered to be Nationally Scarce. Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, mentions a few sites where the plants can be seen in quantity, including North Meadow in Cricklade,Wiltshire. He describes this meadow thus:

North Meadow (now a National Nature Reserve) is an ancient common, and what is known as Lammas Land. Its 44 acres are shut up for hay on 13 February each year until the hay harvest (apportioned by lot) some time in July. On old Lammas Day, 12 August, it become the common pasture of the Borough of Cricklade, and any resident of the town may put up to ten head of horses or cattle on it, or (after 12 September) 20 head of sheep. As far as is known, this system of land tenure has continued unchanged for more than 800 years, and the show at North Meadow may be the best evidence that the fritillary is a native species.’

Whatever their provenance, snake’s head fritillaries are certainly widely naturalised in many places, such as here in St Pancras and Islington cemetery, where they are outgrowing their original planting site and heading off in to the woods. I have some in my garden as well, where they don’t seem to mind the clay soil and the shade.

Although the snake’s head fritillary is such an exotic and enigmatic plant, it appears not to have been used medicinally – maybe its association with lepers was too strong for it to be considered useful. It is also poisonous, though there are no accounts of anybody tucking into a bulb and doing themselves a damage as there are with daffodils.  However, the plant is celebrated as the County Plant of Oxfordshire (due to Magdalen College Meadow being an important snake’s head fritillary site), and also as the provincial plant of Uppland in Sweden. And furthermore, it is also celebrated by me. This most curious plant cheers me up whenever I look at it, in much the same way as I am delighted when a new house spider turns up or when I discover an unexpected caterpillar in the lettuce. I find its snakiness a refreshing change from all the wholesome bulbs that are bursting forth at this time of year, and it reminds me that something (or somebody) doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Bob – Picasa Web Albums, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12365512

Photo Two – By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1680620

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

Dear Readers, with all this talk of asparagus and Jersey Royal potatoes at the start of spring, it’s easy to forget one of the real, regional delicacies of the early part of the year – forced rhubarb. I gently poached some in dessert wine a few weeks ago, and what a delicacy it was! And later in the year, there’s the prospect of a strawberry and rhubarb crumble, with the coarser stalks that appear later in the year.

I know that it’s something of a ‘Marmite’ plant, as discussed in the piece below. And thinking about it now, it’s sad that the plant in the photo above had gone to seed, something Dad would never have allowed if he’d been well enough to notice. I did hack it down myself, but Mum and Dad were not to be around in the house for much longer, and I suspect that it’s now gone. But still, rhubarb is a favourite of mine, and a single mouthful brings back so many memories. Let’s see what I had to say about it.

Dear Readers, rhubarb is something of a travelling plant in our family. I remember a patch of it growing in the two allotments that we had when I was a child, and I strongly suspect that it was the same plant, dug up and transplanted. And now that Mum and Dad live in their Dorset bungalow there is a clump of the plant growing next to the greenhouse. How handsome it is, with its crinkly green leaves that look in need of a good iron, and those lip-puckering stalks, so unpromising raw, so delicious when combined with some sugar and topped with crumble. However, rhubarb is truly a divisive, love-it-or-hate-it plant. I find that people who love it often also favour other strong, uncompromising flavours, such as gooseberries,mackerel, blackcurrants and offal. It is a most assertive ingredient, and needs to be treated with the utmost respect by the cook.

In the first months of a new year there is forced rhubarb, with its yellow leaves and delicate rose-pink stems. In the UK this is grown in sheds in the ‘rhubarb triangle’ (between Wakefield, Leeds and Morley) and is picked by candlelight, in a tradition dating back to the 1800’s. The plants are grown outside for two years (and therefore exposed to frost, which is said to improve the flavour) and are then moved to low, heated sheds – the plants used to be fertilised with manure, night-soil and ‘shoddy’, a by-product of the wool industry. At one time, West Yorkshire produced 90% of all the forced rhubarb in the world, Such was the demand that the ‘Rhubarb Express’ brought up to 200 tonnes of rhubarb to the south every day before 1939. Alas, the post-war availability of more exotic fruits impacted on the rhubarb trade, and today the early rhubarb is an expensive luxury – beautiful, delicate, and, to my mind, less ‘up-front’ than the robust late-spring outdoor-grown plant. But what a treat it must have been before everything was available all the time! We have lost something, I feel, with our strawberries in December and our asparagus in October and our oranges all year round.

But the ‘real’ stuff comes later in the year, with green and red-tinged stems and with a tannic taste that can twist the face into some most amusing shapes. It cooks in seconds, and the stems collapse into mush at the slightest provocation, so if presentation is a concern, keep your eye on your rhubarb. Usually, though, the fruit is covered with a pie crust, or sponge, or the aforementioned crumble, and so appearance is not a major concern. I have been seeing some recipes which use young rhubarb raw in salads, and very pretty they look too.

Those crinkly leaves are poisonous, containing oxalic acid which is a corrosive ingredient that acts particularly on the kidneys. It is estimated that 5 kgs of rhubarb leaves would have to be ingested to run the risk of dying from rhubarb poisoning, but there is also a school of thought that suggests that using bicarbonate of soda in the cooking water ( a common technique for keeping the bright colour of leafy greens) accentuates the toxin. There is also a long-standing belief amongst scientists that there is another, unidentified toxin in the rhubarb leaves. During the First World War there were said to be a few cases of accidental poisoning when people harvested and cooked the leaves, but it seems to be hard to find hard evidence for such cases.

What is much better documented is the long history of rhubarb being used as a laxative – the Chinese have used it for this purpose for millenia, as did the medieval peoples of Western Europe and the Middle East. Along with senna pods rhubarb was one of the ‘comedy ingredients’ of my childhood – it would be clear that anyone eating rhubarb without the traditional sweet accoutrements was constipated. A good old purge was often thought to sort everything out, and rhubarb was just the stuff to do it.

Rhubarb feels as English as, well, rhubarb pie, but in fact it originated far further east, probably in China, and arrived in Europe in the 14th Century via the Silk Route. It was initially prized for its aforementioned medicinal properties, and was extremely valuable, more expensive than cinnamon, saffron or even opium. Have a look at this list of treasures from the East, written in 1403 by the Castilian ambassador to the court of Timur the Great (Tamburlaine) in Samarkand:

‘…The best of all merchandise coming to Samarkand was from China: especially silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb…’

But of course this is a most adaptable plant, and it took to the soils of Europe with much enthusiasm. Soon every peasant had a rhubarb plant of his or her own, and the ingredient was being used in every kitchen.

Rhubarb isn’t technically a fruit, as the stems are used rather than the fruiting bodies (just as a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable). I doubt that that has dampened anyone’s enthusiasm, however. Part of the joy of harvesting a (small amount) of rhubarb is that you head out with your machete,  cut off the stems while imaging that there’s a leopard in the undergrowth waiting to pounce on you (or maybe that’s just me) and return to the house with your booty. None of that time-consuming picking! Rhubarb is definitely an ingredient for the ‘I want it now’ generation. You can have a pot full of rhubarb compote in less than twenty minutes from opening the back door.

Incidentally, I have never seen a rhubarb plant in flower, but this is what it looks like. Rhubarb is a member of the Polygonaceae, which includes buckwheat, the various persicarias, sorrel and Japanese knotweed. If you look closely at the white florets, they look rather like buckwheat.

It’s believed that a slice of rhubarb placed into the hole where you plan to plant a cabbage or other brassica will prevent club-root, and a piece of rhubarb worn around the neck was said to prevent stomach cramps. And in my research for this article, I found a most delightful website called ‘The Rhubarb Compendium‘, which includes the following delights:

• Rhubarb is great for bringing back the shine to burnt pots and pans. I must remember this time next time I forget about my rhubarb compote and boil it dry.
• 3 tbsp of rhubarb root boiled in two cups of water can brighten the colour of blond hair (though I’d test it first. Pink hair is so last century, darling)
• The leaves can be used as an insecticide (all that oxalic acid, I’m guessing) – boil up in water, allow to cool, spray, watch all the aphids retreat screaming, clutching their babies under their arms (not that I’m trying to make anyone feel guilty of course).

But now we come to a most puzzling question. Why is the phrase ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ used to simulate the sound of background chatting in plays and films? Allegedly it’s because the word contains no particularly obvious phonemes, and so if a lot of people are repeating it, in different tones and with different stresses, it sounds a lot like your usual background babble. Other phrases might include ‘watermelon’ and ‘peas and carrots’. Apparently, however, these days what is more often used is something called ‘pocket dialogue’ – a few uncompleted sentences relating to the matter at hand for the extras to say, to simulate the sound of conversation. What a shame. I rather liked the idea of everyone saying rhubarb. Though maybe it stimulated the appetite for a coffee break.

And here, finally, is a rather fine poem about rhubarb, and about lots of other things too….

 

Rhubarb by Matthew Burns

The poison lives only in the leaves,
thick with instant bitterness to warn you,
and my Polish grandmother said
this was to kill off the lazy ones, the stupid ones,
the ones who wanted things handed to them,
who couldn’t find it in themselves to dig.

And planting it told everyone
you didn’t mind dirt under your nails,
that you knew life was hard work if you did it right.
So she grew more than the whole family could eat.

By May, her narrow terraced backyard
in the city’s First Ward was a lapping sea
of palm-sized leaves; by June, a solid ruff of green,
a pruning knife’s hooked blade biting
through the stalks with a flick of her wrist
and a quick snap.

The one time I tried this I sliced deep
into my thumb knuckle at first swipe.
We were both red inside,
me, the rhubarb.
That’s the stuff I didn’t really think about at ten,
how everything bleeds;
how everything must die somehow—
the stupid ones poisoned, the hard workers
heart-worn and wrecked.

We ate the rhubarb raw, stripped of all its leaves.
Dipped in sugar, it still lingered
bitter on our tongues as some inoculation
against the worst of what was yet to come.

Photo Credits

Photo One by © Copyright Alan Murray-Rust and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Photo One by By Rasbak – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6656946

 

Dear Readers, it’s nearly magnolia time again, and I always find myself keeping everything crossed that we don’t get a hailstorm or a particularly windy spell when the flowers are open. At their best, these blooms have a pristine, perfect quality that puts me in mind of porcelain, but if the weather misbehaves you can end up with a mass of browning petals. When I was in Toronto in late April last year, I spotted this rather unusual yellowish cultivar…

…but there was also a dark pink one.

I confess that the typical cream-to-pink one is probably my favourite, old-fashioned though it is….

And below is my original post about magnolia, from 2019. Mum had died, Dad was still alive and in the care home, and I was about to sell their bungalow to raise money for Dad’s costs. It all seems both a long time ago, and like yesterday….

Dear Readers, I am just about to put Mum and Dad’s bungalow up for sale – we need the money to pay for Dad’s nursing home fees. However, Mum was a great lover of colour, and we suspect that some rooms (the candy-pink living room, for example, or the aquamarine bedroom) might need a coat of a rather more neutral paint to enhance the property’s sale price.

‘Magnolia?’ asks the decorator, and I agree. But then I get to thinking what a ridiculous name for an off-white paint this is. Some magnolias are pure white, some are tinged with pink, some are bright pink. None of them are a vague kind of cream colour.

For most of the year, magnolias sit around greenly, doing plant-y things but without much in the way of berries or autumn colour. But goodness. A magnolia in full flower is one of those miracles of the plant world, one of the few trees that can actually stop me in my tracks. I particularly like the old-school magnolias like the one above, with their waxy blossoms opening slowly and prolifically. One storm can ruin it all for the year, of course, but if you’re lucky, they can produce a show worth pondering.

Of course, I missed the height of the flowering of the tree above, but you get the idea.

And here is one from Montreux, in full flower.

Magnolias belong to a very old family of plants (fossil magnolias have been discovered from 95 million years ago), and evolved before bees did. Instead, they are believed to have been pollinated by beetles, and as a result have very tough carpels ( the female reproductive part of the flower) as presumably the beetles were rather more thuggish in their attentions than the later pollinators. Some species of beetle actually ate the magnolia while others distributed the pollen and some did both, so I imagine anything that slowed up the destruction of the flower was a good thing.

There are over 200 species of magnolia, and they grow in Asia and the New World, but not in Europe or Africa. It had never occurred to me, but I associate magnolias both with the paintings of Chinese artists, and the plantation houses of the Deep South of the USA. Siebold’s Magnolia is the national plant of North Korea, while Bull Bay or the Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) is the state plant of Louisiana and Tennessee.

The association of the magnolia with the Deep South has resulted in many artistic connections. The film ‘Steel Magnolias’ featured a group of women who lose their one of their own, and explores their resilience. The poster reads like a summary of the key female actors of the period, and won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Julia Roberts.

In 1939, however, Abel Meeropol’s song ‘Strange Fruit’, memorably sung by Billie Holliday, referenced the magnolia tree as a symbol of the southern US where many lynchings of black people took place:

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

If trees could speak, I sometimes think they would tell some of the saddest and most brutal stories on earth. From the blasted oaks of the battlefields of the First World War to the tropical trees of Vietnam and Cambodia, they have borne unwilling witness to our worst atrocities.

With all those waxy petals waiting to be plucked, you might expect someone to have tried eating magnolias, and you would be right. The flowers can be pickled, the buds can be used to flavour rice, and there is even a type of miso which is flavoured with magnolia. Pickling the petals apparently started in England, but I can’t find a specifically English recipe. The ever-interesting Eat The Weeds website does suggest how to do it, however, and mentions some other flowery favourites as well.

Humans and beetles are not the only creatures who like to take a bite out of a magnolia – in the USA it is the food plant of the magnificent Giant Leopard Moth(Hypercompe scribonia). The male reaches 2 inches in length and has a three-inch wingspan, which would give any one pause. When the male finds a female, mating can take up to 24 hours, and during this period the male will pick the smaller female up and carry her to a warmer spot if it gets too cold. What a gent! However, mating can rub some of the scales off of the female’s wing, impairing her ability to fly.

Should mating be successful, there will soon be the patter of many tiny furry feet. How I love ‘woolly bear’ caterpillars! And this species is said not to cause dermatitis either, so you can admire them at close quarters.

 

The timber of some magnolias is also used, particularly in the northeastern USA and southern Canada, where the Cucumbertree (Magnolia acuminata) is often harvested. Unlike other magnolias, the flower of this species is not very showy, though the fruit might give you pause.

The wood is fairly soft, and is used in everything from pallets and boxes to furniture.

And, naturally, here is a poem. I love this work by Lisel Mueller who was Illinois Poet Laureate. It is full of nostalgia for the joys of spring.

MAGNOLIA

by Lisel Mueller

This year spring and summer decided
to make it quick, roll themselves into one
season of three days
and steam right out of winter.
In the front yard the reluctant
magnolia buds lost control
and suddenly stood wide open.
Two days later their pale pink silks
heaped up around the trunk
like cast-off petticoats.

Remember how long spring used to take?
And how long from the first locking of fingers
to the first real kiss? And after that
the other eternity, endless motion
toward the undoing of a button?

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Roylindman at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17959956

Photo Two by By Wendy Cutler from Vancouver, Canada – 20120522_CamelliaPath_OyamaMagnolia_Cutler_P1240017, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22926817

Photo Three by By Josep Renalias Lohen11 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27938081

Photo Four by By Jeremy Johnson – http://www.meddlingwithnature.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41471642

Photo Five by Phlintorres98 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Photo Six by Asturnut at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Photo Seven by By MikeParker (talk) – Photo taken by Michael Parker, CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17722886

 

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

Dear Readers, when you look at a daffodil/narcissus these days it’s hard not to marvel at the sheer variety of forms – scented ones, big ones, double ones, cream, pink, orange and yellow ones. But apparently this is not a new thing: in Nature’s Calendar, Rebecca Warren describes how back in 1629, plantsman John Parkinson described all the varieties that were already available:

‘Of daffodils there are almost an hundred sorts….some being eyther white, or yellow, or mixt, or else being small or great, single or double, and some having but one flower upon a stalke, others many, whereof many are so exceeding sweete, that a very few are sufficient to perfume a whole chamber, and besides, many of them be so faire and double, eyther one uon a stalke, or many upon a stalke, that one or two stalkes of flowers are in stead of a whole nose-gay, or bundell of flowers tyed together’. 

And all these varieties created before anyone knew all that fancy stuff about DNA, or even the full details of plant reproduction. Such ‘breeding’ was based purely on empirical observation and trial and error. And the results remain: a bowl of paperwhites can perfume not just a single room, but a whole house.

However, some varieties are feared to have become extinct, as a recent article in the RHS magazine pointed out. Have a look at what’s growing in your garden, just in case you have a rarity!

And in the meantime, keep your eyes open as the daffodils start to open, and those yellow trumpets blaze out. A bunch of daffodils is one of the cheapest things you can buy in the supermarket or florist, and they always cheer me up. See if they do the same for you!

In the meantime, here’s some more information on the commonest but most overlooked flower of spring.

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

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.