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.

Dear Readers, you might remember that I recently did a piece on a local front garden that was displaying a very fine display of ‘weeds’. Well, today, as I was limping back from a very pleasant coffee at Coffee Bank with my friend L, she noticed a tiny patch of scarlet pimpernel flowering in a crack in the path of the house next door. What a cheery little plant this is! And I see that the last time I wrote about it was in 2017, so it’s well worth a reminder. In 2017 I was busy looking after Mum and Dad in Dorset as their health gradually declined, and on many a morning it was the sight of an unexpected plant that jolted me out of my to-do list (medications! doctors’ appointments! dinner!) and into the present  moment. So let’s see what I said about this glorious plant seven years ago. Onwards!

Dear Readers, if there is one lesson in life that I should have learned by now, it’s ‘don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today’. When I was in Milborne St Andrew in Dorset last week, I spotted this delightful patch of scarlet pimpernel, every flower open in the sunshine. But, alas, I had milk and rich tea biscuits to buy, and a copy of Woman’s Weekly to pick up, so I hurried past instead of stopping to take a photograph.

For the next three days,  the flowers were closed up tight, what with the fog, and the cold, and the afternoon shadows. And so I’m afraid my photos show them in their ‘coy mode’. However, here is what they look like when they’re in full sun. The plant has alternative names like ‘poor man’s weather glass’ and ‘shepherd’s clock’; the flowers are said to open at 8 a.m. and close at about 2 p.m. unless there’s cloudy or damp weather, in which case they may not bother to put in an appearance at all. I don’t blame them. Now that the clocks have gone back and it’s dark before 5 I often feel like huddling under the duvet with a hot chocolate and a good book.

This plant is a member of the primrose family (Primulaceae) but as far as I know it’s the only  red species. Scarlet seems to be pushing it a bit though – it’s more of an orangey-red. But I am very fond of it – it’s small and unobtrusive, but repays close attention. It’s a plant of arable farmland and seaside environments, such as dunes and cliffs. It is native to the UK and to the whole of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, but has ended up being transported to almost everywhere else in the world, probably with grain crops.

In the Mediterranean area (and, I’ve learned, in some parts of the UK)  there is a rather lovely blue form, which gives rise to yet another alternative name, ‘blue-scarlet pimpernel’.

Despite its demure appearance, however, scarlet pimpernel has a fearsome reputation. It is said that it causes gastroenteritis in dogs and horses, rabbits and poultry, and the seed is said to be poisonous to birds. Fortunately, it also apparently has a very acrid and unpleasant taste, and so most animals avoid it. The plant can also be used as an insecticide (which is probably why it developed the toxins in the first place). However, scarlet pimpernel has also been used medicinally, and in Germany it’s known as Gauchheil (‘Fool heal’) and used to be made into a treatment for those who were melancholy or otherwise mentally indisposed. The  genus name, Anagallis, comes from the Greek ‘to laugh’, and was said to indicate the mood of someone when their depression was lifted.

Of course, many people unfamiliar with this small red flower will be well aware of the novels of Baroness Orczy, who wrote the first of many books featuring The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a chivalrous gentleman who, with his band of loyal followers (‘ one to command and nineteen to obey’) worked to rescue French aristocrats who were destined for the guillotine. As you might expect from the name, the Scarlet Pimpernel left a flower at the scene of his rescues, and also used the symbol in his correspondence. Even if you are unfamiliar with the Pimpernel himself, you might be familiar with some of the parodies that his derring-do inspired, such as the Bugs Bunny episode featuring The Scarlet Pumpernickel, or the programme ‘Nob and Nobility’ in the third series of Blackadder that featured the eponymous hero’s disgust with the adulation accorded to the ‘bloody Pimpernel’.

This action-packed series of novels was the inspiration for many films and television series and radio plays, with probably the most famous cinematic version being the 1934 film starring Leslie Howard and and Merle Oberon.

A poem from the novel has passed surreptitiously into common usage:

‘We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.’

You might recognise the first line from The Kinks 1966 song ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’.

Anyhow, enough excitement! Let’s get back to the plant.

It was believed that holding scarlet pimpernel in the hand would confer the gift of second sight, and also that the plant could give protection from enchantment and spells. I imagine that much of what we now see as mental illness might have been seen as the effect of witchcraft or demonic possession in earlier times, and so the plant’s use has remained consistent – if you are not ‘in your right mind’ for whatever reason, scarlet pimpernel seems to have been the go-to remedy.

It was used to make ‘pimpernel water’, which was considered to be a remedy for freckles (though as they are rather delightful I hardly think they need a ‘remedy’), and also for rough and discoloured skin.

In spite of their allegedly acrid flavour and rich collection of toxins, the leaves have been used in salads, especially in Germany and France. They certainly look very toothsome, but I would be a bit careful if I was you.

This blog often leads me to some very interesting places. In the search for art associated with The Scarlet Pimpernel, I discovered the wonderful illustrator Luisa Rivera, who is originally from Chile but is now based in London. She has recently illustrated a Spanish language edition of the novel by Baroness Orczy, and the cover illustration is below. For more of her dreamy, folkloric illustrations, have a look here. I particularly like the lady with the owl, but they are all haunting and original.

And finally, as you might expect, my search for a scarlet pimpernel poem has been somewhat hindered by about five hundred separate references to ‘They seek him here, they seek him there’ etc etc etc ad nauseum. But then, peeping through the rough grassland of the Google ads comes this tiny gem, by the Irish poet Paula Meehan. It’s called ‘Death of a Field’ and I think it’s both deeply poignant and beautifully observed. We need more homes, but let’s not forget what’s lost. To read it, click here. I will be looking out for Paula Meehan in future.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Scarlet Pimpernel flowers) by Pauline Eccles [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two (blue scarlet pimpernel ) by  Zachi Evenor, cropped by User:MathKnight – File:Anagallis-arvensis-Horashim2014-Zachi-Evenor.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39109428

Photo Three (Nob and Nobility) by By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28399167

Photo Four (Film 1934) by https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9780067

Photo Five (Cover illustration from The Scarlet Pimpernel) from http://www.luisarivera.cl/la-pimpinela-escarlata/ 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, over the years I’ve found a lot of unexpected plants in East Finchley, but this Pyramidal Orchid ( Anacamptis pyramidalis) was the most unexpected. It was growing in a tiny triangle of rough grass in the middle of a car park (forgive me for being a little coy  about the exact location, but I don’t want some eejit to pick it). My friend L spotted it at the weekend, and we are both astonished – we can only think that it’s growing because it’s in a remnant of the meadow that existed way before the tarmac went down. The seeds of Pyramidal Orchid don’t contain enough food to germinate on their own, so they go into partnership with a soil fungus.

Darwin was fascinated by orchids, and discovered that the pollen in orchids is clumped into little coherent ‘blobs’ known as pollinia. These then attach to the tongues of moths and butterflies and are transferred to the next orchid that the insect visits. Below is Darwin’s own drawing of the pollinia attached to the tongue of a butterfly. What an amazing scientist Darwin was, and what a debt we owe him.

Pyramidal orchids can be found throughout western Eurasia, and one of their strongholds is on the chalky soils of the Isle of Wight. They do like disturbed soils, so they can sometimes also be found on road verges and quarries, presumably where the fungi that they rely on to thrive can also be found. And of course, there is now at least one in East Finchley too, though just the one as far as I can see, having had a good walk around the vicinity to see if I could see any more.

As with all orchids, the individual flowers are very interestingly shaped, as you can see from the close-up below. As you might guess from the name, the flowerhead as a whole is pyramid- shaped.

When I look at a Pyramidal Orchid the thought ‘ooh that might be tasty’ doesn’t immediately occur to me, but in fact the root of this plant and various other orchid species are used to make a white, starchy powder called salep. Orchid roots have always been considered as powerful aphrodisiacs and fertility-enhancers (the word ‘orchid’ comes from the Ancient Greek for ‘testicle’, which the roots were thought to resemble). The Ancient Romans used the root of Pyramidal Orchid and other orchids to make drinks called ‘Satyrion‘ and ‘Priapiscus‘, both of which were thought to act to improve ‘performance’ (and I don’t mean in the 100 metres). Paracelsus, the ‘Father of Toxicology’ wrote:

“behold the Satyrion root, is it not formed like the male privy parts? No one can deny this. Accordingly, magic discovered it and revealed that it can restore a man’s virility and passion”

In the Ottoman Empire, the root was used to make a drink for young women in order to fatten them up before marriage. The drink then spread to the UK and Europe as an alternative to tea and coffee – in the UK it was known as ‘saloop‘. It was thought to cure ‘chronic alcoholic inebriety’ and, more shamefully, venereal disease, which meant that drinking it in public became a source of embarrassment. The drink was increasingly associated with ‘the lower orders’ – note that someone is drinking out of a saucer in the Rowlandson cartoon below. My mother used to drink her tea out of a saucer if it was too hot, so clearly she hadn’t got the memo.

Salep became so popular that it became illegal in Turkey to export it , due to the decline in wild orchid populations. However, the attention of the salep sellers has now turned to the orchids of Iran, where it was estimated that between 7 and 11 million orchids of nineteen species and sub-species were collected from northern Iran in 2013. Yikes! As we know there’s no price people won’t pay for sexual enhancement (see also tiger bone and gorilla meat), and this in the age of Viagra. Sigh.

And oh my goodness! Here’s a poem, by Peter Daniels. It won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition back in 2008, and it feels even more apposite today. See what you think.

Shoreditch Orchid by Peter Daniels

They’re grubbing up the old modern
rusty concrete lampposts,
with a special orange grab
on a fixture removal unit.
The planters come up behind
with new old lampposts in lamppost green,
and bury each root in a freshly-dug hole.
The bus can’t get past, brooding in vibrations.
We’re stuck at the half-refurbished
late-Georgian crescent of handbag wholesalers.
The window won’t open. The man behind me
whistles “What a Wonderful World”,
and I think to myself:

Any day soon
the rubble will be sifted; the streets all swept,
and we’ll be aboard a millennium tram ride,
the smooth one we’ve been promised, with a while yet to go
until the rising sea and the exterminating meteor,
but close before the war
starting with the robocar disaster.
And when the millennium crumbles,
I’ll be squinting through the corrugated fence
at the wreck of the mayor’s armoured vehicle, upside down
where they dumped the files of the Inner City Partnership;
and as I kick an old kerbstone
I’ll find you, Shoreditch orchid, true and shy,
rooting in the meadow streets
through old cable, broken porcelain, rivets and springs;
living off the bones of the railway.
You’ll make your entry unannounced,
in the distraction of buddleia throwing its slender legs
out in the air from nothing,
from off the highest parapets, cheap
attention-seeking shrub from somewhere
like nowhere. But here
you’ll identify your own private genes,
a quiet specimen-bloom seeded in junk,
and no use to any of us; only an intricate bee-trap
composed in simple waxy petals, waiting
for the bees to reinvent their appetite.

We’ll be waiting for the maps to kindle
as we get settled, where we find ourselves
undiscovering the city,
its lost works, disestablished
under the bridges. There’s no more bargaining
for melons and good brass buttons.
We share your niche
and crouch as the falling sun
shines through smoke, and the lampposts
fail to light the night to the place all buses go.