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

Dear Readers, I currently have a lovely young man helping me with the garden – he’s a real wildlife gardening enthusiast, and so we are getting on splendidly. And when I was discussing plans re The Fence, he suggested thinking about this plant – Broad-leaved Everlasting Pea. What a great idea! You can see this plant scrambling vigorously along the side of the South Western trainline from Waterloo to Southampton, and although it is not technically native, it was introduced to the UK in the 15th century, so I think we can assume that the invertebrates are well used to it. What a pretty plant it is! Yes I know it’s a thug, but I have confidence that we can ensure that it has manners.

Actually I am starting to wish that I had a bit more fence, since I currently have about eight contenders for it, including white bryony, which is another splendid plant. Hey ho. I should really have something akin to the Knepp Estate, but sadly I have only a suburban garden here in East Finchley, without room for a single beaver or herd of wild ponies. But what I do have in the way of ‘land’ makes me so happy, especially now I’ve bitten the bullet and don’t feel sad and guilty every time I look out of the window.

And here are a few lines by John Keats. They aren’t about this particular species of sweet pea, but I think they work nonetheless. Sweet peas are so often the first flowers planted by children, probably because the seeds are a good size for small hands to handle, and they grow fast, and smell sweet. They certainly make me nostalgic.

Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight:
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.

Onwards! Here’s what I said about Broad-leaved Everlasting Pea back in 2016.

Dear Readers, you may often see this sweet pea lookalike scrambling amongst the buddleia between railway lines, or erupting from wasteland beside electricity substations. Here in East Finchley, it is often seen  in more weed-friendly front gardens, and if it cropped up in mine I would certainly leave it, pretty plant that it is. Unlike the ‘domestic’ sweet pea, this plant has no scent and is a perennial with a preference for clay soil, largely because although it likes full sun, it requires moisture, which heavier substrates provide. Although in its wild form it is sometimes considered to be a weed, there are also cultivated varieties which are marketed as ‘everlasting sweet pea’. It seems that the dividing line between ‘pest’ and ‘garden plant’ is even more blurred with this plant than with other species.

The ‘peas’ of other members of the Lathyrus genus cause a kind of poisoning called Lathyrism, which causes paralysis of the larynx, excitability, paralysis of the lower limbs and eventual death. Lathyrus sativus, or the grass pea, has been a famine food in several countries, and during the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon resulted in the deaths of many poor people, as documented by Goya in the woodcut below. The cultivated sweet pea causes a slightly different kind of poisoning, which attacks the connective tissue. Although there is no evidence to suggest that broad-leaved everlasting pea has been implicated in any such nastiness, I’d certainly be very reluctant to ingest any parts of this plant, although I have seen the flowers described as edible.

Broad-leaved everlasting pea first appeared in cultivation in the UK by the fifteenth century, and had ‘escaped’ by 1670. I am curious as to why it was originally ‘imported’ – many early plants were brought here because of their medicinal properties, or their value as food plants or flavourings, but this plant has none of these benefits, at least as far as I’m able to ascertain. I wonder if its combination of tolerance of clay soils and nitrogen fixing abilities made it a good choice as a ‘green manure’ for improving soils? On the other hand, maybe it was brought here solely by virtue of its hardiness and attractiveness. It certainly attracted the attention of such artists as P.J.Redouté, who is  perhaps better known for his nineteenth century paintings of old-fashioned roses.

So, next time you are sitting on a crowded train heading out of London Bridge or Waterloo stations, have a look at the mass of ‘weeds’ growing at the junctions between the lines. I can more or less guarantee that somewhere there will be a neon-pink tangle of broad-leaved everlasting pea brightening up the place. It’s amazing what you can spot during a commute. It’s almost worth bringing your binoculars.

Photo Credits

Photo One – Swallowtail Garden Seeds (https://www.flickr.com/photos/swallowtailgardenseeds/14913883105)

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

Dear Readers, I have three Christmas Cacti – one pink, one red, and one white, and all  three of them have developed buds in the past week or so, with the pink one bursting into flower, as you can see. They are a little early for 25th December, but I love them nonetheless, exuberant as they are. I always think that the flowers look like some exotic bird taking off from a branch, as indeed I did when I first posted about these plants back in December 2021. So they aren’t doing too badly, and thanks to my lovely friend Jo for buying them!

I just read back through my posts, and realise that last year they didn’t come into flower until November 18th, so they’re getting earlier and earlier. I am slightly puzzled, I must confess. Clearly it isn’t about day length. Anyhow, I shan’t look a gift flowering in the mouth so to speak.

The Christmas Cacti are in the back office, otherwise known as ‘the plant hospital’ – if any of my plants are ailing, I pop them there until I work out what they need (or they expire, whichever happens first). Not that the Christmas Cacti are ailing, but they do seem to like the indirect light and the pretty constant temperature. I water them when I think of it and when they seem very dry (which means that they don’t sit around in water) and the surrounding plants must provide a bit of humidity. Anyhow, whatever I’m doing seems to work, for once.

And by the way, I can’t believe that I’m even talking about Christmas. This was, for me personally, the Year With No Summer, but I imagine it would have felt fast even so. Still, I have so much to be grateful for – my titanium leg, my most excellent friends and neighbours, and the beauty of the autumn leaves as they tumble from the trees.

Now, let’s see what I said in my original post about this plant. Have a look at the poem, it’s a corker, and somehow appropriate for the run-up to Halloween….

Dear Readers, I used to have a bright pink Christmas cactus, that I nurtured for many years until, finally, someone overwatered it and it died. So I was very happy to see a fine selection in the Sunshine Garden Centre this week, and even happier when my lovely friend Jo bought me some as a Christmas present. I love the flowers on these plants – they always look to me a little like a bird leaping into the air. And with the array of buds on this one, I’m hoping that it will be flowering for quite some time.

Plus, I not only got a festive red cactus, but a white one…

and a magenta one, to match this extraordinary magenta cyclamen that I saw.

All cacti (with the exception of Rhipsalis baccifera, which has somehow found its way to Africa) are New World plants, but Christmas cacti are classified as forest cacti. These plants are very different from their desert relations: forest cacti are epiphytic, which means that they grow on the branches of trees or cracks in a rock face in their rainforest homes.  They get water from the humidity of the air or rain, and their nutrients come from organic debris that accumulates around their roots. They therefore hate being waterlogged, as in their native environments the water would just wash away. They live in dappled sunlight, and air circulation around them is also good. All this means that they have to be kept in free-draining soil, and yet like to be sprayed or kept on wet pebbles to keep the humidity up. You often see Christmas cacti in hanging baskets for just this reason – it’s a way to make sure that they get the air circulation that they need, while at the same time being able to spray them for humidity, and admire them from all angles.

In the wild, Schlumbergera grow at altitudes of up to 700 metres (2300 feet) in south-eastern Brazil, and there are six to nine wild species. In Brazil, Christmas cacti can form sizeable shrubs of up to four feet tall. The plants have no leaves, but their modified stems enable them to photosynthesise. The flowers are adapted to be pollinated by hummingbirds (hence the wild-type plant is red, a colour easily visible to birds). Hummingbirds also act to transfer the seeds from one tree to another – as in the post about mistletoe a few weeks ago, the birds wipe their bills to remove the sticky seeds after feeding on the front, hence moving the cactus to a nice new home.

There are two main ‘families’ of Christmas cactus that you’re likely to come across in the stores at this time of year. My plant is Schlumbergera truncata. How can I tell? Mainly because the stems are extremely ‘pointy’ (hence one alternative name of ‘crab cactus’…

and the pollen is yellow.

However, you can also find Schlumbergera x buckleyi in the shops. It is a hybrid of Schlumbergera russeliana and Schlumbergera truncata. The stems of this plant are much less ‘prickly’, and the pollen is bright pink.

And here’s something rather lovely – the flowers of a Christmas cactus opening in a time-lapse sequence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbvh4GQru7Y

Christmas cacti have been cultivated in Europe since about 1818, with the first hybrid varieties appearing in the mid 1850s. They were very popular in the late Victorian period, but by 1900s they had fallen out of favour, and many varieties were lost. It’s funny how there are fashions in house plants – when I was growing up, everyone had spider plants and aspidistra, and these days these are something of a rarity. However, Christmas cacti staged a comeback: by the 1950s they were popular again, with breeders particularly keen on plants that flowered profusely and which also had more of an upright habit than the trailing habit of the wild plant (though I have noticed that most Christmas cacti revert to a more horizontal growth pattern once they mature). They also started to develop plants with different coloured flowers, such as this yellow one, Gold Charm, which is pretty but infertile.

However, colour can be problematic in cultivated varieties: it’s been found that the eventual hue of the flowers is influenced by the temperature during bud formation. A plant that might produce white or yellow flowers can be persuaded to produce pink or red-tinged ones instead if the temperature is above 57 degrees Fahrenheit, and plants that are already pink or red will produce much darker-coloured flowers. Iron is also said to influence flower colour.

If I look after my Christmas cacti properly, they can turn in to really magnificent plants – they don’t like being repotted, they don’t like sitting in water, but apart from that in my experience they are really easy-going plants. You can also propagate them pretty easily by breaking off one of the stem segments after the plant has flowered, letting it dry out for a week  and then potting it up in cactus compost. In this way, a Christmas cactus can be almost immortal, as it will live on its clones even after the parent plant has died. And I have read several stories of Christmas cacti that are decades old, and some which are advancing into their hundreds. I rather like this story of ‘A Christmas Cactus Named Junior‘ by Kathy Keeler at ‘The Wandering Botanist’ for example. ‘Junior’ is certainly looking good after his adventures!

There is a Brazilian legend that a small boy in a Brazilian village prayed for a sign that Christmas had come, and in the morning all the rainforest plants had broken into flower on Christmas Day. Sadly, in Brazil Schlumbergera flowers in May and is in fact known as the ‘May Flower’. Blooming botanists, ruining all the stories.

But here is a poem by Gaia Holmes, discovered in the online version of The Stylist magazine of all things. Gosh, I like this a lot, probably because it makes me uneasy, and that is exactly what this time of year does to me too – the darkness that gathers around all the light and sparkle, like wolves waiting just outside the glow of the fire. Not very festive, I know. Anyway, see what you think, lovely people. There is always a Christmas cactus to admire, with its fantastical flowers and leap of faith.

Shadow Play by Gaia Holmes 

He came in winter
when the house was always dark,
brought red Christmas cacti
fire-crackering from their pots
and a suitcase full of candles,
thickened my gloomy rooms
with light.
I met the shadows he bred
without caution
and did not complain
when he followed me to my bed.
Outside, frost had edged the world
with spite.
The city foxes were howling,
cracking their teeth on the ice.
The sharp scent of January scared me.
His big hands cast wolves on the walls.
Fear made me knot myself
around him.
He had a bristled chin
and smelled of fathers.
‘Tell me a story,’ I said
and he told me how lust
could turn an angel
inside out.

Published in Where The Road Runs Out by Gaia Holmes, Comma Press, £9.99, hive.co.uk

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Schlumbergera_truncata_02.JPG: Lestat (Jan Mehlich)derivative work: Peter coxhead (talk) – Schlumbergera_truncata_02.JPG, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17191427

Photo Two by By Maja Dumat – Weihnachtskaktus (Schlumbergera truncata)Uploaded by uleli, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9728034

 

Dear Readers, it’s always fun to visit an old friend, so I jumped at the chance to go with my human friend L to visit the Totteridge Yew, the oldest tree in London (at approximately 2000 years old). I’ve written about in detail below, but my trip today was in particular to look at an interesting gall that seems to have developed since I last visited.

If you look closely at the photograph above, you’ll see what look like green dahlias growing at the end of some of the branches, in amongst the perfectly normal red ‘fruit’ (known as arils). These ‘dahlias’ are caused by a tiny midge, known as the Yew Artichoke gall fly (Taxomyia taxi). In year one, the midge lays an egg on the bud of the tree, which develops into a bright orange larva, which then lives in the gall for two whole years before emerging as an adult fly. Like all galls, the ‘artichoke’ is a result of chemical signals secreted by the insect, which ‘persuade’ the yew to produce the protective structure. When the fly leaves, the galls go brown – you can see one or two in the photo above.

In spite of the pretty heavy infestation, the Totteridge Yew is overall looking extremely healthy – the galls are unsightly, but don’t appear to do permanent damage to the tree. And in its two thousand years, I imagine that the tree has had to contend with much worse threats. It’s certainly covered in

And so, here is a piece that I wrote about the tree back in 2014. Has it really been ten years since I was last here? Goodness, how the time goes….and if you read down to the end, you’ll see that my basic manifesto hasn’t changed.

I have always felt a little melancholy at New Year. Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert, and I no longer drink alcohol, both of which make me uneasy in situations of forced jollity and large crowds. Or maybe it’s because January feels more like a time for staying in bed, preferably with an excellent novel and a bowl of syrup pudding and custard, than a time for taking up jogging and eating kale. I feel a little out of step with the current need to be happy and shiny and full of vim on all occasions, and it’s difficult to escape a sneaking suspicion that I am some kind of alien as I watch the end-of-year shenanigans unfold.

So to give myself some perspective I went to see the oldest living thing in London with my long-suffering husband, John. This magnificent Yew tree lives in St Andrew’s churchyard in Totteridge, a twenty-minute bus ride from East Finchley. It has seen at least two thousand New Year’s days come and go, and is still full of fresh growth and vigor. To ensure its health, a team from Kew Gardens visited some thirty years ago and did a little judicious pruning and shoring up of the centre of the plant, which invariably becomes hollow as the plant ages.  The trunk is over twenty-six feet in circumference, and the wood is remarkable. In some places, it looks almost as if it is encrusted with sea creatures.

In others, there are little interstices which form homes for spiders and other invertebrates.

Yew is often found in churchyards. In some cases, it was deliberately planted to provide wood for longbows, but in this and many other cases, the tree long predates the church (there has been some kind of ecclesiastical building here since about 1250). It is very likely that the church was built on a site that was already sacred to the people of the area, and that the tree, then a stripling of just over a thousand years old, would have been locally important as a site for ritual and for meetings. Later, it was a site for the gathering of the Hundred, the medieval equivalent of the Magistrate’s court. In 1722, a baby was found under the tree, and was named ‘Henry Totteridge’ and made a ward of the parish.

Part of the reason for the longevity of Yew is that it is very slow-growing, and some scientists believe that the trees could reach ages of four to five thousand years. The Totteridge Yew is one of ten trees in the UK that date back to before the tenth century. Yew is very resistant to the fungal diseases which can cause the death of other trees by infecting the spot where a branch has dropped off. The tree can also regenerate from cut surfaces and from the base of the trunk even when it is of advanced years.

Yew has a long association with pagan rites and beliefs, perhaps because, like Holly, it is evergreen, long-lived and bears berries. The oldest wooden artifact ever found in Europe, a 450,000 year-old spearhead found in Clacton-on-Sea, is made of Yew.   All parts of the Yew are poisonous, except for the red flesh on the berry. A chief of the ancient Celtic tribe the Eburones (the ancient word for Yew was Eburos) killed himself by ingesting a toxin from the Yew tree rather than submitting to the Romans. It is known to be poisonous to horses, and the foliage, in hot weather, can produce a gas which is said to cause hallucinations. This same chemical, however, can be used to produce a drug for use in breast cancer, and for a while pharmaceutical companies were traveling the world, looking for substantial Yew forests to buy and destroy. What is new to science is often long-known by local peoples, however, and Yew has long been used by Himalayan people as a treatment for breast and ovarian cancer.

This is not the first time that Yew has been subject to a threat of over-harvesting. Its wood is perfect for the making of longbows, and in the fifteenth century compulsory longbow practice for all adult males was introduced. This depleted the supplies of these slow-growing trees so profoundly that Richard III introduced a ‘tax’, insisting that every ship bringing goods to England had to include ten bowstaves for every tun of goods. During the sixteenth century the supply of Yew dwindled to such an extent that there was none to be had in Bavaria or Austria. The habit of planting Yew trees in churchyards to ensure future demand may have begun during this time.

Yew trees have a dark, sombre aspect to them and yet, as one of our few native conifers, they provide some greenery when the other leaves have fallen. Their red berries provide a useful source of food for the birds, and I have often watched Goldcrests working their way through the needles with their needle-sharp bills, searching for any hibernating insects or badly-hidden cocoons. I shall be keeping my eyes and ears open in future for the high-pitched piping calls of these birds. Goldcrests are the smallest birds in the UK, with each one weighing less than a two-pence piece.

There is something about spending time outdoors that soothes the soul, and this is particularly true, I find, when I am in the company of a tree of such remarkable character as the Totteridge Yew. It has experienced so much in its long life that my mind is fairly boggled when I think about it. It was already a thousand years old when the Normans came with their stone masonry and castle-building and taste for wine. How many babies have been borne past it in their mother’s arms for Christening, how many young couples have passed under its branches on their wedding day, how many sombre coffins have been carried under the lych-gate to the freshly-dug graves that surround it? Once, people came up to the church on foot or in horse-drawn carts, where now they swoosh past in cars. If only it could tell me what it has seen. As I go, I rest my hand for a moment on that smooth, rose-pink bark, as I suspect so many have done before me. I feel a sense of calm descend, as if I have been holding my breath for a week, and have finally let it out.

Dear Readers, I am occasionally castigated by your good selves for designating a particular plant as a ‘weed’. People have been roused to fury by my inclusion of Feverfew and Yarrow, Holly and Ivy as ‘weeds’, and I understand how for many people (including me) these plants are helpmates and sources of wonder rather than problematic. You can imagine, then, how nervous I am about including that most venerable of plants, the Yew tree, as a ‘Wednesday Weed’, let alone the oldest Yew in London. However, my point is this: no plant is quintessentially a ‘weed’ – this is a purely human label. There is not a single plant that I have included in this series, from the fecund  Duckweed to this week’s remarkable conifer, that doesn’t have much to fascinate and amaze the keen observer. Our urge to classify the natural world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ is what got us into the mess that we’re currently in in the first place. We need to understand the connections between things, even the most commonplace of ‘weeds’, in order to make sensible decisions about everything from the plants in our gardens to the future of the planet. Every week, I learn more about my local environment, but I have also glimpsed the limitless depths that I have yet to understand.  This blog has made me humble, which I have grown to think is the only sensible reaction to the complexity and beauty of the natural world.

Dear Readers, the fleabane by the side of my water butt is finally in flower, and I’m happy to report that it is, indeed, a Canadian Fleabane. But how can you tell, when  there are various other Fleabane species about? First up, each flower is topped with a little white ‘crown’, and the green ‘bit’ that the flower emerges from, the bract, is pretty much hairless.

Then we have Bilbao’s Fleabane (Conyza floribunda) which is a more recent introduction first seen in 1992 (Canadian Fleabane first put in an appearance in 1690), and can also be found in London and along the south coast of the UK. The flowers are very different, as you can see – the flowers look ‘pinched’ at the top, as opposed to cylindrical, and often have a red tinge.

And then  there’s another ‘recent’ introduction, Guernsey Fleabane (Conyza sumatrensis), which first appeared in 1974. This has flowers of a similar shape to Guernsey Fleabane, but the bracts are very hairy, and the flowers are often tipped with purple.

So, Canadian Fleabane  originally came from North America, while Bilbao’s and Guernsey Fleabane originated in South America. All three species have been extremely successful – they have tiny, light seeds that are easily distributed in a gust of wind and, as my garden suggests, this genus can establish itself wherever there’s a suitable crack in the pavement. In fact, in their book ‘Alien Plants’, Clive Stace and Michael Crawley have identified that there can be ‘waves’ of different Fleabanes, with Canadian Fleabane being replaced by Guernsey Fleabane  and then by Bilbao’s Fleabane. The authors point out that it’s not currently known exactly how this works, but for me it’s interesting – all of these species need open ground and sunlight in order to grow (so are all eventually outcompeted by slower growing, more heavily-leaved plants), but whilst Canadian Fleabane started off as a plant of wasteland, it’s now more often found on cultivated and fallow arable land. Guernsey Fleabane has taken a shine to railway ballast, and Bilbao’s Fleabane is found on brick paths. There is so much about ‘weeds’ that we don’t understand, and which can teach us all kinds of things about why some plants survive, some don’t, and how the relationships in a natural community change over time.

And now, let’s have a look at what we’ve found out about Canadian Fleabane and its relatives previously…

Dear Readers, Canadian Fleabane (and its close relatives Bilbao’s Fleabane and Guernsey Fleabane) are such weedy weeds that it’s easy to pass them by without so much as a second glance. Members of the Asteraceae (Daisy) family, they have tiny flowers and a whole lot of fluffy seeds and are annuals of such fecundity that once you have the plant on a patch of rough ground or, as here, along a riverside, you are probably going to have it forever. Experiments outlined in my book ‘Alien Plants’ by Clive Stace and Michael J. Crawley suggest that grazing with rabbits seems to be a way to keep the Fleabane (Conyza) genus in check, but there’s a grave lack of small furry grazing animals in Woolwich, clearly.

Fleabanes tend to grow alongside buddleia, as I noticed from the Woolwich walk.

The name given to the community of plants established by buddleia and fleabane is the Buddleia-Conyza scrub community, and you can see it popping up in many urban sunny sites, frequently on builder’s rubble or tarmac – we have a great example of this just up the road from here in East Finchley on the site of an old petrol station which has been landbanked by developers for years, but you can also find great examples on railway embankments. Fleabanes tend to be the first colonisers, along with mugwort, American willowherb, bristly oxtongue and evening primrose, but soon the buddleia and the sycamore start to take over, with the fleabane tending to die out where it’s overshadowed by the buddleia. This feels like such a very urban habitat that I’m glad that it has its own name and now has people studying it. Colonisation can start within a year of a site being left derelict, and the habitat can persist for up to twenty years. It will be interesting to see how long the example of the Buddleia-Conyza complex in East Finchley lasts before someone decides to actually build there.

And when I looked back at the last time that I wrote about Canadian Fleabane, I mentioned that there was a patch at the side of my house. When I looked early this week, there was still some there, probably descended from the seeds that were dropped by the parent plant back in 2014. You have to admire the plant’s sheer persistence.

So, this is from my original post back in 2014.

A thicket of Canadian Fleabane has erupted in the alley at the side of our house, and I am delighted. I know this is not the reaction that most people would have, but then, this week is the thirteenth anniversary of my marriage to my Torontonian husband, so a little reminder of the country that he came from is very welcome. Plus, although this plant comes from so far away, it has put down firm roots in London, and is more commonly seen in the Capital than in any other city, so in that respect it is a little like me.

There are lots of plants that resemble Canadian Fleabane, but none have such a mass of tiny flowers, which at this time of year are rapidly turning into fluffy seeds. The plant was apparently brought to the UK as seeds in the innards of a stuffed bird, back in the sixteenth century (unlike my husband who arrived into Heathrow in a big metal bird twenty-odd years ago).

In many ways, Canadian Fleabane is a ‘proper’ weed – it’s an annual which produces thousands of seeds, and which can grow in the most unpromising of spots, as its appearance in my dark, soil-less side alley proves. But, as with so many plants, it has a myriad of helpful uses. A tea made from the plant is said to be helpful for arthritis and for diarrhoea, and it has also been used to combat hay-fever. Like so many fleabanes, it is also said to be good for deterring insect parasites.

I can’t help but admire a plant that can erupt from a crack a hairs-width wide and grow to four feet high in a single season.  This afternoon, the little seeds were flying away in the breezy weather, taking their chances on a new land far from where they started. And, thinking of my soulmate who flourished so far from his native soil, I find myself wishing them luck.