Dear Readers, I took a walk amongst the reservoirs of Walthamstow Wetlands today, and it set me to musing on gorse. One of the paths has a thick hedge of gorse on either side, and what fine protection it offers to small birds! I’ve always wanted to see one of these (a Dartford Warbler)…

or a Stonechat…

but I’m equally happy to see one of these birds, singing its heart out…

And I notice that in my previous entry on gorse, I didn’t include a poem so here we go….see what you think. It’s by Michael Longley, who died very recently – you can read more of his work here.

Gorse Fires
by Michael Longley

Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
Before carrying implements to separate fields.

I am travelling from one April to another.
It is the same train between the same embankments.
Gorse fires are smoking, but primroses burn
And celandines and white may and gorse flowers.

And now, let’s have a look at what I said previously about gorse, back in (gulp) 2015.

Dear Readers, a few years ago my husband and I went on holiday to  Jersey. The weather was glorious, and  one of my strongest memories is of the tropical coconut scent of the waist-high gorse that grew on the clifftops, and the sound of the ripe seedpods popping. So imagine my surprise at finding a small cluster of plants in flower on a rainy day in north London. Although there is a saying that ‘when the gorse is in flower, kissing’s in season’ I suspected that the plants would surely take a break in December, but no. And what a joy it is to see those butter-yellow flowers speckled with raindrops among all the mud and dying foliage of other, less enterprising plants.

Common gorse is a member of the Fabaceae or pea family, and like all members of its family helps to fix nitrogen in the soil and so to improve fertility. As a long-living, hardy, native plant, it has been used for a variety of purposes. Some relate to its prickliness – it can make a very effective hedge, spiky and long-lasting. Washing can be hung out to dry on gorse bushes, the spikes acting as pegs. Chopped gorse has been used as a mulch over germinating peas and beans to deter pigeons and mice. And the impenetrable thickets that the plant forms are great habitat for all manner of small mammals and nesting birds.

Despite its coarseness and abundance of spines , gorse has been used as food for cattle and horses, especially in north Wales where other sources of fodder may have been hard to come by. The plants are usually bruised in gorse-mills to soften them before being fed to the livestock. Humans have eaten gorse too – the pickled buds can be used like capers, and the flowers can be added to vodka or gin to flavour the spirit.

Pliny stated that branches of gorse could be placed in a stream in order to capture any particles of gold in the water, an ancient version of gold-panning.

Gorse has also had a long association with fire. It was used as firewood, particularly for baking, and was so popular that bye-laws were instituted to ensure that not too much was taken – Richard Mabey reports that under the 1820 Enclosure Act, the parishioners of Cumnor Hurst were allowed to harvest as much gorse ‘as they could carry on their backs’. In spite of its tough nature, gorse is not completely frost-hardy, and a particularly vicious winter can put paid to great tracts of the plant on open ground. It was therefore necessary to husband it as a resource, and to take only what was needed. Sustainability is not a new idea at all, but for most of the history of mankind has been seen as an obvious necessity. It’s only recently that we seem to have developed the idea that natural resources are never-ending.

Once burned, the ashes from gorse were used as an excellent fertilizer, or mixed with clay to form soap.

Gorse is normally a plant of open grassland (the very word ‘gorse’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘gorst’, meaning wasteland) and as such is subject to fires caused either accidentally (by lightning strike) or by deliberately in order to clear the land of old gorse bushes. As a fire-climax plant, gorse is adapted to these occurrences, and responds by putting out new green shoots, which can be used as softer fodder. In the right conditions, a single gorse bush can live for over 30 years.

In spite of its long flowering season, gorse has always been associated with the spring, and with the return of the sun. Gorse fires were set on the hillsides in at spring equinox, and burning brands of the plant were carried around the cattle herds to ensure their good health for the following year.  In Ireland, gorse was said to protect against witches, and it was also said that if you wore a sprig of gorse you would never stumble. In Scotland, it is said that Edinburgh will fall if the gorse does not come into flower. In Dorset and Somerset, however, it was unlucky to bring a sprig of the plant indoors, as if you did so a coffin was sure to follow shortly in the opposite direction. It is the sure sign of a plant that has been our companion for a long time that such a variety of beliefs has sprung up.

For me, gorse means heat, and skylarks singing, and a lizard skittering across a sandy path. It was not something that I expected to see today, one of those Sundays when the sun barely seems to get above the horizon before it sinks down again, exhausted. But what a joy it was to see those golden buds, and to remember that summer afternoon, something that I hadn’t thought about for years. My personal history seems to be written in plants and animals, each of them a talisman of a time and place.

Resources used in this post:

Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey – the best compendium of plant lore every published in my opinion. Endlessly interesting.

The Plant Lives website by Sue Eland – a gathering together of worldwide plantlore. Especially useful where plants have become naturalised  outside the UK, and are being used by local people

The A Modern Herbal website – all manner of medicinal, culinary and other uses for British plants.

Dear Readers, it’s a bit early for daffodils to be in flower yet, but at the Sunshine Garden Centre they are selling two bunches of daffs for three pounds so spring must be on the way! Let’s have a look at what I said about daffodils in the Wednesday Weed back in 2016.

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

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

Dear Readers, I absolutely love this little woodland plant, and was delighted to see a few leaves popping through in Bluebell Wood yesterday. Sadly I still haven’t managed to get it to go in my garden, in spite of several attempts, though it grows very happily in my friend A’s patch. Hah!

I am currently watching re-runs of Great British Menu, and I note that one of the participants made a sweet woodruff ice-cream – someone said it tasted a bit like hay, which I’m not sure is a recommendation (unless you’re a horse or a guinea pig). But surely something as pretty and delicate as this would make something delicious. Let me know if you’ve ever experienced something flavoured with it!

And now, let’s see what I said back in 2021. I like the poem at the end, see what you think.

Dear Readers, I bought some sweet woodruff because I thought it would be perfect for the shady side of the garden. It was lovingly planted, watered and tended, and within about three days it had practically disappeared, with no sign of obvious nibbling. On the other hand, my good friend A has banks of the stuff in her garden, and so I know that the local conditions are not the problem. Still, that’s gardening for you, a succession of small disasters and happy accidents. If you have any illusions that you’re in control, I suggest you get a garden. It certainly put me right.

Anyhow, sweet woodruff is a really delightful plant. It’s a member of the bedstraw family (Rubiaceae), and is a plant of ancient woodland, with leaves that are said to be hay or vanilla-scented when bruised. It’s native to the UK but grows in a great swathe across Europe and Asia all the way to Japan, taking in Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus en route. In German it’s known as ‘waldmeister‘ or ‘Master of the Woods’ which seems a bit martial for this delicate beauty. It’s also known as ‘Wild Baby’s Breath’ – I assume that the ‘wild’ refers to the plant, not the baby (or indeed the breath).

As you might expect for something so sweet-smelling, sweet woodruff has been used for a variety of purposes. The sweet smell lingers on after the plant is dried, so it has often been used in pot pourri and cosmetics. It seems to have been particularly favoured as a flavouring in Germany, where it’s used in May Wine (Maitrank), an alcoholic beverage traditionally served on May Day. Maitrank involves steeping sweet woodruff in white wine, and very refreshing it looks too.

The plant was also used to flavour beer (Berliner Weisse), ice cream, brandy and a Georgian soft drink called Tarhun. It was used to flavour sherbet powder, though in the UK I’m sure we’re all much more familiar with the zesty lemon-flavoured substance that used to be eaten with a liquorice stick. Alas, the substance that gives woodruff its flavour is called coumarine, and in 1974 the Germans banned its use in products for children because it was found to cause liver damage (and children, being smaller, are more susceptible). Adults can still lay their hands on sweet woodruff-flavoured alcohol, but artificial substitutes are now used in sweets.

In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey describes how dried woodruff was hung in wardrobes and laid amongst stored linen to deter moths. The leaf whorls were apparently used as bookmarks, and during Georgian times the leaves were placed in the cases of pocket-watches, so that the user could inhale their fragrance whenever they needed to tell the time. Mabey reports that woodruff no longer grows wild in London, but that it was once hung in churches on St Barnabas Day, the 11th June. And a turning close to the Tower of London, now called Cooper’s Row, was once called Woodruff Lane.

And finally, a poem. A few posts back, I wrote about friendship, and how it’s undervalued in our society compared with the love we feel for family and romantic partners. This feels like an intensely personal poem, and yet it made me think of so many of my female friends, past and present, and the things that we’d shared. See what you think.

Up, Over the Steep Hill
by Kathleen Ripley Leo

‘May we strive to touch and to know the great common woman’s heart of us all…’ Mary Stuart

Catch her by the waist, a woman friend,
whose laughter you hear in the night
ringing in your ears: over your elaborate strategy to lose weight;
over the grand joke you keep to yourselves;
over swearing her to secrecy for driving you
to the Secretary of State when you’re late renewing.

Catch her by the waist, a woman friend,
whose baby daughter crawls through your dining room
looking for all the world
like a pink shell on the carpet, she moves so sweetly;
whose son shares his bike lock with your son at school,
the son she cheers on to win the race, to make the grade,
to stay alive one more day in the isolette.

Catch her by the waist, a woman friend,
whose hostas and phlox bloom in your garden;
with whom you kneel and pray for peace;
with whom you silently walk in the woods
hoping the raccoon, sunning itself
on the branch overhead, does not wake up,
hoping the deer in the clearing does not bound away,
who watches with you, both apprehensive and in awe,
as two snakes curl and dance in the sun
on the cement pavement at Maybury;
who takes care of the cat, the mail, the paper,
the broken ground between your houses,
picking you up at the side of the road
when you’ve locked your keys in the car,
quelling the shaking wings of your heart.

Catch her by the waist, a woman friend,
who has lunch with you after the angel tour at the Art Institute;
who helps you overcome your panic attack at the mall,
or on that crowded street in Washington DC,
or at that Brighton home tour;
who asks you to write your poems and to read them outloud;
who helps you pick out glasses to fit your odd and funny face;
who carefully tends to the basil parmesan bread,
so you can take it to your progressive dinner party
and claim you made it;
who washes your clothes in her machine when yours gives out.

Catch her by the waist, a woman friend,
who tells you what happened to the bank of sweet woodruff you dug out
the spring your father died, because in the fall
you couldn’t remember doing that;
who tells you how to think about toxic criticism;
who helps you cope with aggressive jealousy;
who drives you to the hospital when your baby needs x-rays,
and then when your husband’s there;
who drives you to the doctor for the procedure,
and carefully holds you when you cry;
who sees your letters unanswered,
and your invitations refused, sees your hurt and stays quiet;
who catches your waist, too, and together, laughing and crying,
you pull each other up, over the steep hill.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Dr. Bernd Gross – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49057025

Dear Readers, it’s so heartening to see my one clump of snowdrops pushing through the soil, even after the long cold snap that we’ve just come through. At this time of year they feel like the first sign that winter is coming to a close, although if you listen there are lots of other indications that the sap, literal and metaphorical, is already rising. In Queen’s and Highgate Woods yesterday, the woodpeckers were drumming, the Great Tits were calling ‘teacher, teacher’, and the robins were tolerating one another, a sure sign that maybe they’re thinking about pairing up. Spring happens much earlier than we think, and by the time there are buds on the trees and the daffodils are out, many creatures will already be paired up and raising their young.

Still, there’s a way to go yet until us humans feel like we can shed a layer of clothing, so let’s see what I was saying about snowdrops back in 2015…

For me, the sight of the first snowdrops of spring is like a long drink of cold water after a hot, dusty walk. The dazzling white flowers and the fresh green-grey foliage seem fresh and toothsome, as delicious as the first asparagus.

This is especially true in a woodland setting, and in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery there are a number of unkempt, wild areas, where the graves have become overgrown with moss and lichen. Here, the Snowdrops have naturalised, creating a wash of white that glows in the dim spaces.

Some vernacular names for the Snowdrop include February Fairmaids, Candlemas Bells and, my own particular favourite, Snow Piercer. This last has a fine Saxon edge to it, as if the plant were a well-loved sword. And yet, there is much debate over whether it is a native plant or naturalised. The answer is probably that it is both. As Richard Mabey points out in Flora Britannica, it is native to Continental Europe, and grows wild in northern Brittany, so it may be that the colonies in the south-west of England are native, arriving while the UK was still part of the European mainland, while those elsewhere are the result of garden escapes, albeit from hundreds of years ago. The Snowdrop has long been associated with purity, and may have been deliberately planted in monastery gardens and churchyards.

I have found Snowdrops extremely difficult to grow in my garden, and I have the feeling that they are not a hundred percent at home in our climate. They emerge too early for most pollinating insects, which makes sense if you consider that they probably come from an area with warmer winters and earlier springs. Because of this, they spread by division of the bulbs, rather than by seed. Many cultivated varieties are also sterile. Chelsea Physic Garden runs Snowdrop Days during February, to show off the sheer variety of cultivars: to read the Gentle Author’s account of a visit, and to see photos of some of them, have a look here.

The Latin name for the Snowdrop genus, Galanthus, means ‘milk-flower’, and the nivalis species name means ‘of the snow’. So, even if you had never seen a snowdrop you would have the definite impression that it was white. And such a white! But each flower also has exquisite green markings on the petals, and also inside the flower itself.

In Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, a priestess, Circe, turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs. To protect against her enchantments, Odysseus is given the plant Moly by Hermes, and there is some agreement that Moly was, in fact, the Snowdrop. One theory is that the transformation of the crew was a metaphor for the euphoria and hallucinations induced by plants such as Deadly Nightshade and Datura. It just so happens that the Snowdrop contains a chemical called Galantamine, which can counteract the effects of these plants. I love the way that story and science mix here, as they so often do. In the painting below, Circe is offering Odysseus a nice refreshing drink, though the pig on her left-hand side is something of a warning. Just as well Odysseus has his Snowdrop to protect him.

Because of their association with purity, the flowers were sometimes used in Victorian times to warn off over-passionate lovers – a few Snowdrops in an envelope might be enough to dampen a young man’s ardour. But Snowdrops have also been considered unlucky, and in some parts of the UK a single flower is still seen as a death-token, perhaps because, as Mabey explains, Victorians felt that the flower looks ‘for all the world like a corpse in its shroud’. But to me, the bloom looks more like a beautiful white and green moth, and, coming from Bugwoman, there is no higher praise.

 

 

Dear Readers, Pendulous Sedge is one of those plants, rather like Teasel, that will stay with you forever whether you like it or not. As you will see from my original Wednesday Weed below, I have rather decided that I like it – it seems so at home beside the pond, and when its many, many children pop up in other places it only takes a moment to pull them up (though as you can still buy them in garden centres I think I should probably be potting them up and selling them on). It’s also worth remembering that this is a native plant that thrives in the very particular claggy clay soils of London (amongst other places) – I regularly see it popping up in Coldfall Wood, for example. If you look closely at the photo below, from 2015, you’ll see how at home it is amongst the marsh marigolds and valerian.

What I didn’t know when I wrote my original post is that Pendulous Sedge has been used in a variety of ways – its seeds are edible, and, stripped of their husks, can be used in bread or salads, or even ground  into flour. Robin Harford, of Eat The Weeds, uses the seed to make a kind of gomasio, where the seeds are popped and then ground with rock salt to make a Japanese-style seasoning.  However, as Harford points out, Pendulous Sedge can also be used for phytoremediation – this is where plants are used to suck up the heavy metals from soil/water, so it’s probably wise to make sure this isn’t the case before you go gathering the seeds.

On the Plant Lore website, someone describes how his grandfather used to make ‘horrible biscuits’ with Pendulous Sedge seeds – he describes how country people understood how nutritious the seeds were, even if they weren’t the tastiest.

The plant has also been used for rope-making  – those stems and leaves look as if they could make something  very robust.

Here’s a photo of the male and female ‘flowers’ that I describe in the piece below :  the shaggy ‘flower’ on the far left is the male flower, which produces pollen, while the other four ‘flowers’ are the female parts, which produce seed.

And look, here’s a sedge poem! My mother used to recite this by heart when we were little children sick in bed. I think she was getting her revenge for being kept up so late, because reading it now it’s a very eerie poem, not at all suitable for infants. Then, she used to sing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ as well. I think my mother was a Goth at heart.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John Keats

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said –
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed – Ah! woe betide! –
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

And now, let’s see what I had to say when I first wrote about Pendulous Sedge back in (gulp) 2014…

Dear Reader, I must confess that when a plant makes an appearance in my garden, I am inclined to leave it alone until I find out what on earth it is. Sometimes, this is a grave error (the incident of the Ground Elder springs to mind). On other occasions, though, I discover that exactly the right plant has appeared for the spot that it has chosen, and then I am delighted. The plant above is called Pendulous Sedge, and it has erupted like a green fountain in a particularly shady spot next to my pond, where everything else I’ve tried to grow has failed.

The name ‘Sedge’ is said to come from the same root as the Latin verb ‘secare’, meaning to cut, and the sedge family has been used for everything from papyrus to basket-making to boat-building. However, what I like about Pendulous Sedge is its grace and vigour. Four or five catkins dangle gracefully from each stem, like so many lambs tails – there are usually one or two male catkins at the top, with the female ones underneath. Pendulous Sedge likes cold, claggy clay soil, and so it has succeeded where so many of my fancier plants have folded up and died.

I note that opinions on the plant are divided. On the RHS website, it lists no fewer than 132 suppliers who will sell you a Carex pendula should you not have one simply turn up. On checking one nursery, I discover that three plants will cost you 9.99 GBP plus postage. I feel a momentary warm glow of satisfaction.

However, further on on the same website I notice that it is described as a ‘thug plant’ – one that can quickly get out of hand and run rampant all over the garden.

Harrumph. I suppose the question is this: do we want a garden in which the plants that grow thrive, or do we want to be forever coaxing, forcing and persuading plants to do well when they’d much rather be elsewhere?

Pendulous Sedge is a plant not only of watersides, but of ancient woodlands. The photo below is from my visit to Cherry Tree Wood last week, where I saw the plant growing happily in a damp hollow.

Not so long ago, the land where my house now stands was part of Finchley Common, an area of scrub and moorland that was notorious for Highwaymen right up to the Eighteenth Century. A gibbet used to stand at the end of what is now the road next to mine. I have no doubt that every gully and pond would have had stands of Pendulous Sedge, and when it pops up in my garden now, it reminds me that human settlement is a very recent thing here, and that the plants and animals still reflect the way the land was then. So, thug or not, it is welcome in my garden, for the frogs to sit under, for the dragonflies to rest on, and for all manner of creeping things to nestle into.

 

 

 

Dear Readers, today (18th December) it’s been 6 years since Mum died, so it seems like a good time to have another look at her favourite flower, the Freesia. However, although Mum was able to appreciate the Freesia’s heady scent, it appears that some people can’t smell it all, and to some other people it appears to smell like sausages! Research has shown that genetic mutations in our scent receptors mean that we really do each live in our own ‘scent world’, where something  that smells delightful to one person may not be discernible to someone else, or may even smell repulsive. Who knew? But I for one am grateful that I can smell freesias, though I have never found anything ‘freesia-perfumed’ that came close.

And now, let’s dash back to 2018, and what I said about Freesias then. And do you have a favourite scented plant? Let me know!

Dear Readers, when I was at the nursing home last week, visiting my Mum who is dying, the staff nurse was talking about how they could make the room a little more peaceful.

“We can put in softer lighting and gentle music”‘ she said, “and some candles, maybe some scented ones…”

“Not the scented candles!” I said, “I wouldn’t want Mum’s last thoughts to be about how much she hates the smell of jasmine…”

And indeed, Mum has something of a dislike of many scented products, especially since she became ill. Things that she’d previously loved have become overwhelming. But there is one flower that may still work, at least in its natural form, and that is the freesia. Its light perfume isn’t overbearing and thuggish, but insinuates itself into the mood of the room without any drama.

There are 16 species of freesia, all of them from Southern Africa and most from Cape Province, home of so many unique plants. The one that we buy comes from a  hybrid between two species, Freesia refracta and Freesia leichtlinii which was made in the 19th century, and a more recent addition of Freesia corymbosa which gives us the pink and blue forms.

Although there are many freesia-scented toiletries and perfumes on the market, nothing that I have smelled comes close to the scent of the plant itself. It is often used in wedding bouquets, and my mother wanted some for hers back in 1957, but was told that, as her wedding was in September, there would be none available. She did, however, get some beautiful sugar paste ones on the cakes made for the 60th Wedding Anniversary celebration back in September 2017, so she got them in the end.

Nowadays, you can get freesias pretty much year round, and most of the blooms are produced from some eighty suppliers in the Netherlands, bulb capital of Europe.

Freesia can be grown from seed, but is actually a bulbous plant, a member of the crocus subfamily. In their native habitat, freesias are usually pollinated by solitary bees. Their period of dormancy underground may be a protection from the grassland fires that are a common feature of the fynbos, or Cape Floral Kingdom, where they originated. For all their apparent delicacy these are tough plants.

The flowers of freesia are edible, and I rather like the idea of a freesia and lemon tisane, as described on the Garden Eats website here.

In the Victorian Language of Flowers, the freesia represented trust, and in the US is apparently the flower to use to celebrate a couple’s seventh wedding anniversary. If you wondered what you were meant to be sending on the other years, have a look at the list here. I am somewhat disappointed that there are no suggestions for an eighteenth wedding anniversary, as mine is coming up next year. Looks like I’ll have to wait until my twentieth.

And now, a poem. Here is one by Robert Henry Forster, a poet who took the garden and the more ‘domesticated’ plants as his last subject. He was Northumbrian born and bred, and I imagine that the colour and scent of the freesias in his greenhouse were even more welcome in the teeth of northern gales than they are here in London. This example of his work is a big bowl of custard of a poem, as comforting as bed socks and Heinz tomato soup. It’s just what I need at the moment, what with the Winter Solstice coming on. On some days, it barely feels as if the sun gets above the horizon before it slips back into bed.

The Greenhouse in Early April, by Robert Henry Forster (1867 – 1923)

I
Still do the garden’s half-awakened beds
Wait for the passing of the wintry cold;
But in this fairy palace we behold
The sheltered blossoms lift their comely heads.
Fragrance the newly opened Freesia sheds
From its white trumpets with the splash of gold;
And here the Polyanthus doth unfold
Its blooms, and colour with gay colour weds,
Colours of brilliant or of subtle hue;
Bright orange with fair yellow for its mate;
Pale yellow margined with a fairy blue;
Crimson and gold in almost regal state;
Soft pink and brown, ethereal to view,
Matched with a yellow not less delicate.

II
And here, most faithful of all blossomed friends,
The Primulas their witchery display.
Spring will depart and summer pass away,
But for these happy flowers one summer ends
Only when Nature’s operation sends
The next succeeding summer’s opening day:
In drear December they will still be gay,
As though for winter they would make amends.
So should true friendship be,-a constant thing
In sunshine or beneath a gloomy sky,
Not waking only with the breath of spring
And ready at the winter’s touch to die,
But bright and helpful and encouraging
When days are dark and other comforts fly.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Makoto hasuma [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two from http://pza.sanbi.org/freesia-leichtlinii-subsp-alba

Photo Three by User:BotBln [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

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, did any of you manage to identify this magnificent tree from my photograph yesterday? It is the largest Ginkgo that I’ve ever seen, tucked away in the middle of Ravenna. There are lots of other smaller, younger trees, but this one has clearly been there for decades. All the street trees here have a very interesting pruning regime – they seem to be cut back when the trunk is quite short, leaving just a handful of main branches. Plane trees in particular look very different from the ones here in London – they’re much more squat, but maybe they’re easier to manage in a city setting. I didn’t take a photo myself, but you’ll get the idea from the photo below.

I feel rather sorry for the little pine tree (?) planted in the lower right-hand corner. It’s trying its best, but it is rather overshadowed by its neighbour. In general, the floral plantings are of the ‘stick-them-in-for-few-weeks-and-then-compost-them’ variety – there are lots of chrysanthemums and begonias which I doubt will do well if the temperature gets lower (I was surprised how cold it was). But there was a rather nice meadow planting around the Tomb of Theodoric, with knapweed and cornflowers and such, though you’ll have to take my word for it this time, as I was too busy photographing the tomb.

Anyhow, it seems that Ginkgos are having ‘a moment’ as street trees (but only the male ones, as you’ll see in my previous post below). In the latest edition of his book ‘London’s Street Trees’, Paul Wood describes how the male trees produce prodigious quantities of pollen, which makes it very unpleasant for hayfever sufferers. On the other hand, arboriculturalists apparently describe Ginkgo as ‘bulletproof’ (it was one of the few trees whose seeds survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima for example), and so I suspect it will increase in numbers on our streets over the next few years.

Apparently, there is a museum in Weimar dedicated to Ginkgo – this is possibly because Goethe wrote a poem, based on an observation of the strangely-shaped leaf of the tree. The poem was dedicated to Goethe’s friend Marianne von Villemer, but as they saw one another for the last time only eight days after he gave her the poem it’s possible that she wasn’t impressed. Here it is, in translation of course. See if you would have stayed or run away.

In my garden’s care and favour
From the East this tree’s leaf shows
Secret sense for us to savour
And uplifts the one who knows.

Is it but one being single
Which as same itself divides?
Are there two which choose to mingle
So that each as one now hides?

As the answer to such question
I have found a sense that’s true:
Is it not my songs’ suggestion
That I’m one and also two?

Translated by John Whaley

And so, let’s see what I wrote about the tree back in 2018. My, how the time flies!

Ginkgo (Maidenhair) tree in East Finchley cemeteryDear Readers, my visit to East Finchley cemetery last week was the gift that just keeps on giving. I felt that this venerable tree deserved more than a few lines in a longer piece, and so this week I want to look at the ginkgo, a popular street and cemetery tree here in North London, and yet one which I have often hurried past. Before anyone gets over-excited, this is quite clearly not a ‘weed’ by any normal definition, but have you ever tried finding a ‘weed’ in mid-November which, after nearly four years of weekly posts, hasn’t been covered? Flexibility will be required from hereon in, I suspect.

Gingko is immediately identifiable from its leaves. No other living tree has fan-shaped foliage, but fossilised ginkgo leaves have been found from 270 million years ago. The tree existed at the same time as mare’s tail, which was a Wednesday Weed a few weeks ago, but, unlike that plant, poor ginkgo really is the last of its kind. There is nothing else alive that is remotely like it.

Once I spotted one ginkgo, I found them everywhere: at the end of Archway Road, in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, and on Durham Road. But they are, in some ways, problematic. Ginkgo trees have separate sexes ( the technical term is dioecious), but each sex has some disadvantages as a street tree. The female trees produce a fruit which looks a little like an apricot (the name ‘ginkgo’ is said to come from a misspelling of the Japanese name for the plant, which means ‘silver apricot’) but if this falls and starts to rot, it is said to produce a smell that combines the odour of vomit with the stench of rancid butter. The pollen of the male trees, which naturally produce no fruit, is highly allergenic, and so not good for hay fever sufferers. Nonetheless, the tree is beautiful enough for groundskeepers everywhere to keep planting it.

Incidentally, among its many peculiarities is the fact that the male ginkgo produces sperm which is covered in tiny mobile hairs that enable it to move. In this, ginkgo is similar to mosses and algae, but completely different from flowering plants. It has several adaptations to a time before these competitors came along: for example, it grows very quickly to a  height of about 10 meters before extending any side shoots, which was probably because most plants at this time were ferns and horsetails, and so the need was to get as high as possible as quickly as possible, and then to shade out everybody else.

Not only is the ginkgo a very ancient species, but individual trees are both resilient and long-lived. Six ginkgos which were within 2 kms of the epicentre of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast survived, and are given the honorable name of ‘hibakujumoku’, or ‘survivor trees’.

At the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shinto shrine in Japan a giant ginkgo which had stood beside the staircase since the creation of the building in 1063 finally collapsed in 2010. A botanist who examined it declared that the trunk had rotted. It was thought that that was the end, until both the original tree stump and a piece of the tree planted nearby started to produce a fine crop of new leaves.

If you go into any chemist, you are likely to see herbal preparations with pictures of that distinctive fan-shaped leaf on the box. It is often marketed as a way of delaying the effects of old age, perhaps because the tree itself is so sprightly, and we hope to acquire some of its characteristics. It is said to be beneficial for macular degeneration, dementia, forgetfulness generally, ‘post-menopausal cognitive decline’ ( I guess that’s when I start a sentence and have no idea what I meant to say by the time I get to the end), post-stroke recovery, arterial disease and tinnitus. Oh that it did half of what it says on the packet, but sadly scientific trials have all currently drawn a blank. There is also some fear that if you are taking a blood-thinner such as warfarin or coumadin, overdoing it with the gingko will result in rather thinner blood than you were hoping for. On the other hand, Chinese doctors have been using ginkgo since 2800 BC, so I refuse to lose hope. The plant is certainly full of interesting chemicals such as amentoflavone (which can inhibit the uptake of certain medications) and ginkgolic acid, which is highly allergenic, so maybe these can be turned from ‘the dark side’.

You might think that there would be nothing edible to be found on a ginkgo tree, what with all that talk of the smell of the fruit, but the seeds of the ginkgo (once the smelly stuff is removed) are a traditional food in both China and Japan. In particular, they form part of a celebratory dish called ‘Buddha’s Delight’ which is served at Chinese New Year, a time when a vegetarian diet is thought to bring good luck. And very tasty it looks too.

Whilst researching this piece, I came across this painting by the Japanese artist Watanabe Shotei, and promptly fell in love with it. I like the way that the crow is framed, and the way that the autumn-yellow ginkgo leaves are scattering as she flies through them. This is very different from his other, more formal work, and I think that it sums up the mischievousness of the bird as it ploughs through the august foliage. Or maybe it’s just me.

And finally, there is a belief that even in the shedding of its leaves, the ginkgo is not like other trees. Whilst the oak leaves and the maple leaves drop off one at a time, all the leaves from a ginkgo are said to fall in one night. I can’t say I’ve seen much evidence of that happening with the trees that I know, but maybe this is the case in harsher climates. The poet Howard Nemerov had this to say on the subject:

Late in November, on a single night

Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees

That stand along the walk drop all their leaves

In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind

But as though to time alone: the golden and green

Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday

Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

What strange communication occurs between these ancient trees, I wonder, and what complex combination of chemical signals would give rise to such a thing? The more I learn about trees, the less I know.

 

Japanese Acer on Bedford Road in East Finchley

Dear Readers, it’s certainly the time of year for Japanese Acers – there are several around the County Roads in East Finchley which are truly spectacular. 

Japanese Maple on Huntingdon Road

Japanese Maple on Twyford Avenue

Japanese Maple with ‘Keys’ in July 2021

However, all these spectacular trees make me think about how temperamental Japanese Maples can be. They seem to like sun (most of the ones in the photos are in south-facing gardens) but not too much, they like to be damp but not too damp, they seem to like to be sheltered (but see previous re dampness). Clearly some people have found the idea spot, and the trees are delighted. I’ve tried once or twice, but it’s always ended in disaster – the leaves dry up and drop off, leaving a sorry collection of twigs. Sigh. I think I’ll leave this plant to people who know what they’re doing, but any advice would be greatly appreciated. I’ve always dreamed of having an Acer next to the pond. 

Anyhow, have a look below for my previous posts on Acers. They are clearly something of an obsession. 

Dear Readers, I wrote a long post about Japanese Maples last year, and such is my enthusiasm for them that I almost did it all over again this afternoon, having forgotten that I had featured it previously. However, I couldn’t miss the chance to share one of my favourite local trees with you. This Japanese Maple has burst into such extraordinary colour this year that it draws the eye as soon as you enter the street. It is the only substantial plant in the front garden, as there isn’t room for anything else, but at the moment it glows like a beacon. My husband got this (admittedly blurred) photo of the tree when it was absolutely at its height last week, and while the colour might look a bit over-saturated, I’m sure you get the idea.

Although today the plant is very slightly past its best (it was very windy over the weekend) it is still touched with fire.

There is something to be said for allowing a single extraordinary plant to take the room it needs to be truly magnificent, even if it means that for the rest of the year there is a more subtle display. There is an elegance about this Acer that I’m sure will make it noteworthy at any time of year. I admire the confidence of this home-owner, and their willingness to let this beautiful tree slowly develop over time, and take up so much space. Nearly every Japanese Maple that I see is wind-damaged, with the delicate leaves pinched and dried out, but I suspect that the hedge is protecting this one from the worst ravages of the weather.

Having not noticed this tree until this year, I am again thankful for the way that the lockdown has encouraged me to get out and about every single day. I have lived in East Finchley for ten years and yet have never seen this tree in all its peak autumn glory before. For all the miseries of this terrible year, there are still moments of joy to be had.

And now, back to my previous post. If you haven’t read it before, I hope you enjoy it, and I really do recommend the Clive James poem at the end.

Dear Readers, I have always been entranced by the delicate beauty of the Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) but have never had much success with growing them. My first attempt was on my balcony in Islington, which is a most unhappy location for a woodland plant – the poor thing was alternatively blasted by the wind, baked by the sun and then nearly knocked flat with rain. The leaves shrivelled and fell off, and I soon realised that I’d need to grow something that liked being exposed to the elements. A second attempt, in the heavy clay soil of my current garden, also produced a sad specimen rather than the glorious autumn-hued plant that I saw on the label. Oh well. Recently, I have spent a lot of time admiring other people’s plants instead. Sometimes, one knows when one is beat.

Our local garden centre certainly has a wide range of very tempting cultivars, nearly all of which have the ‘hand-shaped’ leaves which give the plant its species name ‘palmatum’. Japanese maple comes originally not just from Japan but from the areas roundabout too: Korea, China, eastern Mongolia and southeastern Russia. In Japan, the plant has been cultivated for centuries, and has the alternative names of kaede (‘frog-hand’) and momiji (‘baby-hand’). In ‘the wild’, Japanese maple grows as an understorey shrub or small tree in woodland, rarely getting to taller than 10 metres. When mature, the tree has a characteristic dome shape, which is sometimes also emulated in Bonsai.

Even in the wild, Japanese maple is a very variable tree, with different leaf-forms, habits  and colours. It also hybridises with other species. It is therefore no surprise that there are hundreds of different cultivars of the tree available today, with hundreds of others lost during the years. The photo below gives just some idea of the variety of leaf-forms alone.

For most people in the UK, the delight of a Japanese maple comes from its autumn leaf-colour. The saplings in the garden centre were largely dropping their leaves, but enough were holding on to get some idea of what the plant would look like in its prime.

I wasn’t aware that you could also grow Japanese maple for its bark colour, in much the same way as you would plant dogwood, but here is a cultivar that I’d never come across before. Apparently ‘coral-bark’ or ‘golden-bark’ Acers are ‘a thing’. I live and learn.

The flowers of the Japanese maple seem to be the least interesting thing about a plant that certainly punches above its weight in all other aspects. The fruit produces a winged seed, or samara, that needs to be stratified(frozen for a time) in order to germinate.

Reading the Royal Horticultural Society website on Japanese maples, I start to see what I’ve done wrong in the past. The trees need shade, which is obvious once you know what their natural habitat is. They also need consistent water conditions, and loathe being water-logged. All this makes me think that maybe I’ll try again, in a container this time. I have a shady garden, after all.

In Japan, the planting of a maple tree indicates that autumn is seen as a friend, as part of the cycle of life. People in North America often make special trips to view the ‘fall colour’, and a similar expedition may be made by Japanese people, although the viewing of the maples has more of a spiritual component: it is seen as a way of communing with nature, and with the spirits of nature. There is a fascinating discussion of this, and of the relationship between the Japanese maple and art, on the prints of Japan website, and I would like to quote just a smidgen here;

‘Bruce Feiler in his 1991 volume Learning to Bow describes making friends with a Japanese fellow who explained the background and significance of maple viewing to the Japanese: “Certain natural phenomena because of their splendor and singular beauty, developed almost a religious significance in ancient Japanese culture, where Shinto beliefs held that nature was the home of spirits who lived in the water, the land, and the trees. The mysterious transformation of green leaves into fiery reds and frosty yellows around the time of the harvest every year inspired awe among superstitious farmers. Just as a protocol around making tea… or painting calligraphy… so a proper form of viewing nature eventually evolved.” Feiler continued: “According to the Shinto code, the viewer on a proper leaf-viewing excursion should try to achieve a personal communion with the leaves, in a bond akin to the private communication between man and god at he heart of many Western religions. As Prince Genji once wrote to a lover, ‘A sheaf of autumn leaves admired in solitude is like damasks worn in the darkness of the night.’ By entering nature, one hopes to internalize the beauty of the leaves in one’s heart. Man enters nature, and nature, in turn, enters man.”’

The idea of the interconnection between nature and humanity, the notion that we don’t just go to admire the leaves but to internalise their beauty,  seems part of what is missing in our lives these days.

The gardens in Kyoto are especially famous for their beautiful maples, and there is a rather fine little film here, which I guarantee will reduce your resting pulse-rate.

I was surprised to find that Japanese maple leaves are deep-fried and eaten as a snack in Osaka, and have been for at least a thousand years. The ones from the city of Minoh are especially prized – they are preserved in barrels of salt for a year, then dipped into tempura batter. Apparently the tree can also be ‘tapped’ for maple syrup, like its North American relatives, though the sap is not as sugary.

The leaves were thought to have preservative properties, and apples and root vegetables were sometimes buried in them in the belief that they would last longer.

And finally, friends, I cannot end this piece without including the poem ‘Japanese Maple’ by Clive James. When I was growing up, he was a constant feature on TV shows such as ‘Clive James on Television’, which introduced the UK to such shows as ‘Endurance’, a kind of Japanese precursor to ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here’ and possibly even more sadistic. But later, I discovered him as a poet, and a philosopher, and grew to see beyond the ‘larrikin’ exterior to a man of great nuance and sensitivity. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and wrote this poem as a farewell in 2013. He then survived a further six years following an experimental drug treatment, and in an interview described himself as ‘feeling embarrassed’ to still be alive. He died earlier this week, and I  hope that he was able to see his tree aflame against the amber brick.

Japanese Maple by Clive James

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Rüdiger WölkThis photo was taken by Rüdiger Wölk. Please credit this photo Rüdiger Wölk, Münster.View all photos (large page) of Rüdiger WölkI would also appreciate an email to rudiger.wolk@gmail.com with details of use.

Photo Two by By Jeffrey O. Gustafson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2680250

Photo Three by By Abrahami – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1327092

Photo Four by Sten Porse [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]

Photo Five by Anja Steindl from https://www.flickr.com/photos/94958741@N08/8905190448