Cyclamen in my garden at the weekend.

Dear Readers, the last time that I wrote about cyclamen was back in 2016, so I thought they would be worth a revisit, especially as the ones in my garden are doing so well. I rather suspect that these are Cyclamen coum, the Eastern Sowbread, as they come into flower after the autumn-flowering Cyclamen hederifolium discussed below but all the plants are so confused at the moment that it’s anybody’s guess. It would be rather nice to plant both to extend the planting season especially if, like me, you have a preponderance of dry shade.

The cyclamen is certainly far away from its Mediterranean home (though it has been here for a long time, as you can read in the piece below). D.H Lawrence got very carried away with it in his poem ‘Sicilian Cyclamen’ – there are some lovely things here, but rather too many of them, which is often the case with D. H. Lawrence in my opinion. When I was younger I found the abundance of metaphor to be almost as dramatic as I was, but these days I just feel a little disgruntled and overwhelmed. Anyway, see what you think, lovely people!

Sicilian Cyclamens
BY D. H. LAWRENCE

When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow:
When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it
in a knob behind
—O act of fearful temerity!
When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven,
their eyes revealed:
When they left the light of heaven brandished like a knife at
their defenceless eyes
And the sea like a blade at their face,
Mediterranean savages:
When they came out, face-revealed, under heaven, from
the shaggy undergrowth of their own hair
For the first time,
They saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes, growing
Where the slow toads sat brooding on the past.

Slow toads, and cyclamen leaves
Stickily glistening with eternal shadow
Keeping to earth.
Cyclamen leaves
Toad-filmy, earth-iridescent
Beautiful
Frost-filigreed
Spumed with mud
Snail-nacreous
Low down.

The shaking aspect of the sea
And man’s defenceless bare face
And cyclamens putting their ears back.

Long, pensive, slim-muzzled greyhound buds
Dreamy, not yet present,
Drawn out of earth
At his toes.

Dawn-rose
Sub-delighted, stone engendered
Cyclamens, young cyclamens
Arching
Waking, pricking their ears
Like delicate very-young greyhound bitches
Half-yawning at the open, inexperienced
Vistas of day,
Folding back their soundless petalled ears.

Greyhound bitches
Bending their rosy muzzles pensive down,
And breathing soft, unwilling to wake to the new day
Yet sub-delighted.

Ah Mediterranean morning, when our world began!
Far-off Mediterranean mornings,
Pelasgic faces uncovered
And unbudding cyclamens.

The hare suddenly goes uphill
Laying back her long ears with unwinking bliss.

And up the pallid, sea-blenched Mediterranean stone-slopes
Rose cyclamen, ecstatic fore-runner!
Cyclamens, ruddy-muzzled cyclamens
In little bunches like bunches of wild hares
Muzzles together, ears-aprick

Whispering witchcraft
Like women at a well, the dawn-fountain.

Greece, and the world’s morning
While all the Parthenon marbles still fostered the roots of the cyclamen.
Violets
Pagan, rosy-muzzled violets
Autumnal
Dawn-pink,
Dawn-pale
Among squat toad-leaves sprinkling the unborn
Erechtheion marbles.

And now, back to 2016.

Dear Readers, I have always loved cyclamen – there is something about the way that the petals stream ‘backwards’ that remind me of the wings of a bird as it lands. At this time of year you can see lots of naturalised cyclamen in hedgerows, parks and other dryish places (the photos this week were taken in my Aunt Hilary’s Somerset garden). The plants have been showing their cherry-blossom flowers in the UK since 1597(they are originally from the area around the Mediterranean), and have been here long enough to acquire a vernacular name – ‘Sowbread’. There are variations on this name in several of the European countries from which the plant came: ‘pain de porceau’ in France, for example – and this is presumably because the pigs ate the tubers when they were rooting in the woods in autumn.

At first glance, it’s difficult to imagine what plant family cyclamen belong to, but if you look into to the lower part of the flower, where the stamens are, you’ll see that it looks rather like the middle of a primrose. And this is the family to which cyclamen has finally been allocated, after a brief flirtation with the Myrtles, a most unlikely place for this plant to end up. Genetics has solved a lot of strange taxonomical anomalies: when I was growing up, giant pandas and red pandas were placed in a family together, even though they shared few obvious similarities. What a relief when geneticists discovered that giant pandas were exactly what they looked like –  bears – and popped them back with the rest of the family. Though I imagine it made no difference whatsoever to the pandas, who just carried on munching the bamboo.

There are 23 species of cyclamen in total, but the one that is naturalised in the UK is Cyclamen hederifolium. One reason that the plant is so valuable in a garden is its very late flowering: the leaves and flowers die back completely during the spring and summer (probably a mechanism for avoiding the worst of the Mediterranean heat) and then reappear, almost miraculously,  in the autumn. The leaves themselves are exquisite, heart-shaped and patterned in cobweb-white and the palest of green, and the species name ‘hederifolium’ means ‘like the leaves of the ivy’. I can see the resemblance. ‘Cyclamen’, incidentally, comes from the Greek word for ‘circle’. Many sources rather prosaically mention that this is because the tubers are round, but I wonder if it is because of the way that cyclamen appear, flower and disappear in a circle of life. As they can be remarkably long-lived plants (up to a hundred years) I wonder if they seemed both mysterious and eternal.

Although the flowers are usually pink, there is occasionally a white one.

The tubers of cyclamen were used in a variety of ways. In ‘A Modern Herbal’,  it is suggested that a tincture of the root, applied as a liniment, would cause ‘purging of the bowels’ (so stand well back!) Juice from the root is said to be poisonous to fish, and an ointment made from the tuber is said to expel worms. All in all, the action of the plant seems to have been about getting various things out of the body which shouldn’t be there.

Given that the root of cyclamen has such purgative qualities, and that it also contains saponin, a most unpleasant-tasting chemical, I was surprised and pleased to find that there is one recipe which uses cyclamen leaves rather as vine leaves are used in dolmades in Greece. The History of Greek food website is a great source of information on the uses of many of the foods of this area, and for a Fava Stuffed Cyclamen Leaves recipe, just click here.

From Sue Eland’s ‘Plant Lives’ website I learn that, in the language of flowers, cyclamen is said to represent voluptuousness, diffidence and goodbye, a rather difficult combination to carry off I would have thought. A small cake made from the plant and baked will cause paroxysms of love in whoever eats it. The plant is said to offer protection from the ‘evil eye’ (and its close relative, Cyclamen persica, has been a house plant for centuries), but if a pregnant woman stepped over a cyclamen it was believed to cause miscarriage. If it appears in your dreams, it is a sign of calamity. All in all, it appears that you never know where you are with a cyclamen.

When I was in Hilary’s garden, I should have hunkered down and had a sniff of the cyclamen, for the pink ones, at least, are said to have a sweet scent. Here is Walter Savage Landor (1775 – 1864) on the cyclamen:

‘Thou Cyclamen of crumpled horn

Toss not thy head aside;

Repose it where the loves were born

In that warm dell abide.

Whatever flowers, on mountain, field,

Or garden, may arise,

Thine only that pure odor yield

Which never can suffice.

Emblem of her I’ve loved so long,

Go, carry her this little song. ‘

As you might expect, the unusual form of the cyclamen made it a favourite with still life painters, such as the remarkable Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, who worked in the Netherlands during the 17th Century.

‘Bouquet of Flowers in a Glass Vase’ by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1621)

However, they have also inspired more recent painters. Koloman Moser, whose painting is below,  was a member of the Viennese Secessionists, a group that included Klimt. The plant was to be a big influence in Art Nouveau generally, with its love of the natural world and the exotic. And I can see why people were influenced to record the fleeting beauty of cyclamen. To see those flowers, poised as if to take flight, amongst the fallen leaves of autumn is to experience a brief moment of wonder.

‘Cyclamenstock’ by Koloman Moser (1868-1918)

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

Winter-flowering Cherry on Huntingdon Road in East Finchley

Dear Readers, if there’s one plant that is guaranteed to be in flower on my birthday, it’s the winter-flowering cherry at the bottom of my road here in East Finchley. How welcome it is! Today the temperature is below freezing, and the road rang with the sound of windscreens being scraped, but here’s the tree, popping out its snowflake-flowers.

So, why does this tree flower from November to April, instead of in spring like any self-respecting plant? The answer is not ‘climate change’ (in this instance), or to enable the blossom to be pollinated by some particularly weather-proof bee. Nope, it flowers in the winter because we’ve bred it that way, presumably because we felt the long, dark January days needed some cheering up. On his ‘Street Trees’ blog, Paul Wood points out that in the very coldest weather the blossom actually gets frost bite and turns brown. Wood also mentions that winter-flowering cherries have a second burst of flowering in April, just as the leaves appear, and that these flowers are different from the earlier ones – the spring flowers have stalks, the winter ones don’t.

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

Indeed. And now, let’s see what I had to say about this plant back in 2016.

Winter Flowering Cherry (Prunus subhirtella)

Dear Readers, this plant may seem an odd choice for a Wednesday Weed. For one thing, it is not a ‘weed’ even by my very wide definition and, although it probably originated in Japan, it is unknown in the wild. But on a dark January day, with slushy snow still on the ground and with the bitter wind infiltrating every gap between clothing and skin, it lit up St Pancras and Islington Cemetery like a sprinkle of starlight.

The people of Japan have an enduring relationship with cherry blossom – the fairy Ko-no-hana-sakuya-hime, ‘the maiden who causes the trees to bloom’, is said to waken the dormant trees into blossom by softly breathing on them. These were the trees of Emperors, and much time and effort was spent in selecting the best specimens (cherry trees are capable of great variation) and developing new kinds – the Japanese have had double-flowered cherry trees for over a thousand years. Furthermore, the Japanese knew about the art of grafting one tree onto another since early times, and so could propagate a new and exciting variety by persuading a cutting to grow from the stem of a more mundane tree. This is one reason why many people believe that the Winter Flowering Cherry is a hybrid (probably between the Fuji Cherry (Prunus incisa) and the Weeping Tree (Prunus spachiana) ). In Japan, the trees are doted upon, and some Winter Flowering Cherries can reach a very impressive stature.

A pink Winter Flowering Cherry at the front of the Juinji Temple in Koshu, Japan.(Photo One – Credit below)

Although the fruit of ornamental varieties of cherry is usually inedible, the Japanese pickle the blossoms in plum vinegar. The pickle is used with wagashi (a traditional Japanese sweet) and with anpan, which is a kind of Japanese doughnut.

Pickled Cherry Blossom (Photo Two – credit below)

A plate of Wagashi (Photo Three – credit below)

Salt-pickled cherry blossoms in hot water produce a kind of tea called sakurayu, which is drunk at festive events.

Sakurayu – cherry blossom tea (Photo Four – credit below)

The Latin species name ‘subhirtella’ means ‘slightly hairy’, apparently a reference to the young wood. I shall have to look more closely later in the year to see if the plant has a tendency to shagginess.

Although it hasn’t been cold here in London, it has felt like a very long winter, and of course we are not out of the dark yet. But it is rather cheering to see something flowering when it should, rather than months early, and if any bee were foolish enough to venture out when it gets a little warmer at least there will be something for it to feed on. I like to think that maybe the collective spirits of all the people buried in the cemetery derive some pleasure from the flowers as well. At the very least, this early cherry blossom is something beautiful for the visitors to the cemetery to gaze upon when their mood is at its lowest. Let us never underestimate the solace that nature can provide.

Photo Credits

Photo One: By Sakaori (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

Photo Two: “Sakura yu2” by Suguri F – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sakura_yu2.jpg#/media/File:Sakura_yu2.jpg

Photo Three:”和菓子PA100093″ by Akiyoshi’s Room – Akiyoshi’s Room. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E5%92%8C%E8%8F%93%E5%AD%90PA100093.jpg#/media/File:%E5%92%8C%E8%8F%93%E5%AD%90PA100093.jpg

Photo Four: “Sakura yu” by Suguri F – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sakura_yu.jpg#/media/File:Sakura_yu.jpg

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

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

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

The Song of Wandering Aengus
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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

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

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

Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

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

Hazel Catkins (Corylus avellana)

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

Male Hazel Catkin

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

Female Hazel Catkin

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

Hazel leaves and nuts (“Corylus avellana”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corylus_avellana.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Corylus_avellana.jpg)

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

A Wattle Hurdle (“Wattle hurdle” by Richard New Forest – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wattle_hurdle.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Wattle_hurdle.JPG)

Here, a Wattle gate is used to keep the animals out of the 15th Century cabbage patch. This is from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval handbook on health and well-being, and well worth further study.

And here we can see a wattle and daub construction, with the twigs visible behind the mud used to make the walls (By MrPanyGoff (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

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

Chickweed (Stellaria media) Photo by Kaldari

Dear Readers, I have always been very fond of chickweed – it seems to grow where nothing else will, and yet its flowers are very beautiful when seen close up. It likes disturbed ground, and so will often grace the most unlikely pile of rubble. Its Latin name means ‘medium-sized star’, although ‘tiny star’ would be more appropriate.

This was one of the very first ‘weeds’ that I wrote about, and I still remember what a voyage of adventure those first explorations of my neighbourhood were. As I got to know the various plants, and where they grew, it felt as if a whole new world had opened up. It was like getting to know the neighbours, and indeed my strange behaviour when I was weed-hunting introduced me to many people who wanted to know what on earth I was doing with a field guide in one hand, a camera in the other and my nose two inches from a tiny plant. I am still searching for some ‘weeds’ that should be around, but that I’ve never seen – pellitory-of-the-wall springs to mind. It’s a London plant, but I’ve never seen it in East Finchley. I shall have to go further afield, clearly.

And finally, a poem by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky. The chickweed mentioned here is probably not ‘our’ chickweed, but I love the poem all the same.

A Spell Against Bomb Makers

This, officers, is common chickweed,

cousin of a prickly sow thistle.

If you lean your ear

to her stem

you can hear

yourself leaving.

– Ilya Kaminsky

And now, let’s see what I had to say about chickweed back in 2014.

When I was growing up, we had a blue budgerigar called Fella. He lived in a cage on our sideboard for his entire life. For most of the time, he seemed to be happy enough, as far as we could tell, although I suspect that keeping a single bird when, in his native Australia, he would have been a member of a flock thousands strong was tantamount to cruelty. Still, these were days when most people didn’t think about these things: we did our best to be kind to the animals that we kept, without ever considering whether we should have kept them at all.

Every so often, Fella would flap his wings frantically, sending a cloud of feathers and bird shit all over the carpet and driving the dog into a frenzy of barking.

‘He’s having a mad half-hour’, we would say, trying to shush the dog and sweep up the debris.

But what I remember is that occasionally, I would bring Fella some Chickweed from the garden. I remember the tilt of his head as he pulled it through the bars, the look of concentration on his face as he peeled off the leaves, the way that he used his beak with great gentleness and delicacy.  In such a stultifying life, I wonder if the Chickweed was a highpoint, something that gave him a sense of the world outside the bars, a tiny piece of the wild that he would never experience.

Chickweed (Stellaria media)

The Chickweed is coming into flower again at the bottom of the street trees on my road. It forms a kind of green ruffle, covering the chicken bones from the KFC and the cigarette ends. The leaves are so green, the flowers so tiny and star-like that it seems like a last taste of spring in the midst of October. The plant is a member of the same family as Ragged Robin and Red Campion, and, as you might expect from its name, it is popular with chickens as well as budgerigars.

In the spring, Chickweed is considered good eating by humans too, and may turn up amongst the salad leaves at fancy restaurants. It’s also the foodplant of the caterpillars of this beautiful moth:

Yellow Shell moth (Camptogramma bilineata) “Camptogramma bilineata” by Eric Steinert – photo taken by Eric Steinert near Munich, Germany.

Chickweed also has a reputation for being an anti-inflammatory, especially when turned into an ointment. The water in which Chickweed has been boiled is said, when sipped, to be a cure for obesity, and can also help with the symptoms of rheumatism.

In her wonderful website Plant Lives, Sue C.Eland describes how Chickweed undergoes what is known as ‘The Sleep of the Plants’ – at night, the leaves curl over any new shoots to protect them from the cold, like a chicken snuggling her chicks under her wings.

Chickweed also has a line of hairs on its stem that all point in one direction. These channel dew into a pair of leaves where the water is absorbed and helps to hydrate the plant in times of drought – as the plant often grows in exposed, disturbed areas, this extra fluid must be very useful.

You can just make out the hairs on the stem in this lovely shot by By Kenraiz Krzysztof Ziarnek (Own work)

As we go on this journey of exploration together, I am constantly surprised by the memories that these plant and animal companions unearth, and  what a new dimension being aware of them brings to my life. Going to the shops means pausing to see what is growing, and often involves a quick about-turn to collect a camera or a plant guide. Having a conversation with a neighbour may mean suddenly swivelling on a heel to watch an unfamiliar flock of birds pass overhead. The flora and fauna  that surrounds me is giving me roots, helping me to find my home here. The least I can do is to acknowledge and to celebrate them, in all their surprising and inspiring variety.

Shepherd’s purse – photo by João Domingues Almeida athttps://flora-on.pt/?q=Capsella

Dear Readers, Shepherd’s Purse is one of the smallest, most inoffensive plants that you’re likely to see growing at the edge of a wall or next to a bollard. I first wrote about in 2014 when I was just starting to blog, and at the time it didn’t seem odd to me that this isn’t considered a native plant – as described below, it’s technically an archaeophyte, thought to have arrived in the UK before 1500. And yet, other small ‘weedy’ plants such as chickweed are accorded full native status. It’s all very puzzling, but greater botanical brains than mine have come to their own conclusions.

What is in no doubt is that Shepherd’s Purse is a very widespread ‘weed’ indeed. In Stace and Crawley’s ‘Alien Plants’, Shepherd’s Purse appears on the top 30 alien plants in London, suburban Bedfordshire and rural East Sutherland, one of only 5 plants to appear in all three lists (the others, in case you’re interested, are Buddleia, Sycamore, American Willowherb and Ground Elder). One reason is that it is an annual that will happily inbreed, giving rise to a whole range of microspecies (30 are listed in Druce’s Plant List of 1998, for example). This is important as the flowers of Shepherd’s Purse don’t attract a whole lot of pollinators, so sometimes the seeds for next year have been self-pollinated. No wonder the plant is so successful.

So, let’s see what I said about the plant eight whole years ago.

Shepherd’s Purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris)

Shepherd’s Purse is one of those straggly  white-flowered weeds that grow at the bottom of walls, or in amongst the roots of city trees. It gets its name from its seed-pods, which are shaped like the leather pouches carried in medieval times, hung by draw-strings from the belt. The name also gives a clue to the length of time that it has been in the UK, for this little plant is a long way from home. It originated in Eastern Europe and Asia minor, but has been with us for a long time – it is considered to be an archaeophyte in the UK, which means that it came here prior to 1492. Plants which came along after this date are known as neophytes.

Like many so-called ‘weeds’, Shepherd’s Purse is an annual, and flowers almost all year round, the seed scattering far and wide from those heart-shaped seed pouches.

Shepherd’s Purse Seedhead

There can be several generations of Shepherd’s Purse in a year, and the seeds can also survive for a long time in the soil, making it an ideal plant for an urban environment. When conditions are right, it will proliferate. When times are hard, the seeds will wait for better times to arrive. Once you have noticed Shepherd’s Purse, you will see it everywhere, going about its modest business without any ostentation. Yet, it has been used in a variety of ways all over the world.

Shepherd’s Purse (the long straggly plant with the white flowers)

Shepherd’s Purse is a member of the cabbage family, and in many parts of the world it is actively grown as a food plant. It is increasing in popularity in this country as a foraged addition to salads, and in Japan is part of a ceremonial barley and rice gruel that is eaten on January 7th (for more details, have a look here). Although in cities it rarely reaches more than a few inches high, in rich soil, or when cultivated, it can grow into a more substantial plant, up to two feet high, with bigger, juicier leaves.

Shepherd’s Purse has also been used medicinally – a tea made from the plant is described as a ‘sovereign remedy’ against haemorrhage, especially of the kidneys. In Germany, the plant has been approved for use against nose-bleeds, pre-menstrual syndrome, wounds and burns. During the First World War, the herb was used in Germany to stop bleeding after other, more conventional remedies became unavailable.

Finally, the seeds of the plant are much loved by small birds, and I have watched sparrows hopping along the wall at the end of my street, pecking up the little ‘purses’.

This inoffensive, useful little plant is all around us, and yet, we have no respect whatsoever for it. This is the scene that greeted me a few days ago when I wandered up to the High Street:

Dying Shepherd’s Purse and other ‘weeds’

Someone had decided to spray all the little weeds growing at the foot of the wall beside Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’m not sure whether it’s the council, or the staff from KFC. I suspect the former – Barnet Council ‘gardeners’ have a zero-tolerance policy towards anything that isn’t a rose bush or a petunia. All these micro-habitats gone. All those seeds poisoned. I just hope that the sparrows have the sense not to eat them.

My one consolation is that I doubt it will be long before the Shepherd’s Purse is back. There will be seeds in the soil, just waiting for the toxins to die down. In the battle between man and plant, my money is always on the plant.

Dear Readers, I hear so many people complaining about green alkanet, the way that it takes over, the way that its tap roots go down to the centre of the earth etc etc. But the blue of its flowers is pretty much unmatched, especially at this time of year, and it is much favoured by pollinators, so that seems like a win to me! In Alien Plants, Clive Stace and Michael Crawley point out that in sensitive habitats, green alkanet can form a monoculture that excludes other plants, and it’s certainly vigorous. They also, however, point out that no native plant in the UK has ever gone extinct because of an alien ‘invader’. For me, I think it’s all about the vulnerability and fragility of the habitat – I love seeing green alkanet in the city, where there’s already an ecosystem of outrageously tough, prolific and hardy plants, but if it took over the undergrowth of my local ancient woodland I would be a little bit less impressed.

In London, green alkanet is the 6th commonest non-native plant (Buddleia is the commonest, you’ll be pleased to hear), and in suburban Berkshire it’s also the 6th commonest, with sycamore being the most often seen. In East Sutherland in the North of  Scotland, however, it doesn’t appear on the list at all – we know that it doesn’t like acidic soil (see below), so this might be the main reason. It might also not be suited to the colder habitat – it comes originally from Western Europe, so I imagine that it’s used to a milder climate. It seems to like urban streets and also motorway verges, so it’s clearly not scared of a little concrete. Stace also describes it as a ‘wall alien’, meaning that it’s a plant that is often found along the bottom of walls, a most peculiar habitat but one that a variety of London ‘weeds’ have taken a liking to, including yellow corydalis and ivy-leaved toadflax.

Incidentally, green alkanet’s Latin name, Pentaglossis sempervirens, means ‘five-tongued’ and ‘ever green’. I’m guessing that the five tongues refers to the petals, and the ‘ever-green’ to the plant’s habit of popping up at any time of year. Seen amongst the dead leaves of autumn, it really is a most toothsome colour.

And look what I found! A poem, and a good one too. See what you think.

Green Alkanet by Meryl Pugh (from her book Natural Phenomena)

From the hot flank of the bus to the pavement lunch between meetings
in the dazed, hot, infinite day of August:
green alkanet in profusion, persistent, taken for granted
between brick wall and tarmac, on vacant sites,
untended verges.
The hairy, blistered leaves,
the robust, fluted stalk; green alkanet in flower stares
with clarity brewed in a white day-for-night pupil – where world
is altered, reversed – and holds in its blue, pitiless iris
the same, blue intensity that drags us, thrashing, on –

And so, let’s move on and see what I said about green alkanet in my first Wednesday Weed, back in 2015.

Green Alkanet (Pentaglossis sempervirens)

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

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

Green Alkanet was introduced into gardens before 1600, and was first recorded in the wild in 1724, so it has been with us for a long time. It is a true Londoner inasmuch as it can’t abide acidic soils, and so the cold, claggy clay of the capital suits it down to the ground (literally). It is a very hairy plant – the stems are hairy, the lavender buds are hairy, the leaves are hairy (and sometimes feature white spots as well). It is readily attacked by rusts (as in the specimen above). All in all, it is something of a bruiser, a street-fighter of a plant whose toughness belies its delicate flowers.

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

The Henna Tree (Lawsonia inermis)

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