Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Of all the things that grow in our cities, I have a soft spot for the ones that make their homes in walls. There’s something about these plants,  clinging onto life in such a dry, sun-baked, inhospitable situation that fills me with admiration. On Sunday, I found a whole wall full of Ivy-leaved Toadflax. Tiny plants were growing on the top and then seeding right down to the bottom, like a kind of botanical candle-wax. Once I got home, I started to do some research and discovered, to my delight, that the plant is designed to do just this: when in flower, the blooms turn towards the light, but once the flowers are over, it becomes ‘negatively phototropic’ – in other words, the seed heads bend away from the light, to deposit their seeds into darker places, like cracks or the shadow at the bottom of a wall. When I find out something like this, I want to rush out into the street, stand by a patch of Ivy-leaved Toadflax and tell everybody who passes about what a fascinating plant it is. Fortunately, my blog enables me to do this without being arrested.

Toadflaxes are a member of the Figwort family, which also includes such plants as Mullein, Foxglove and Antirrhinums. However, the trick to identifying a toadflax is to look at the lower ‘lip’ of the flower – this is called the Palate (because it guards the ‘throat’ of the flower), and is formed of two lobes.

Ivy-leaved Toadflax was brought to the UK from southern Europe in the early seventeenth century, and was said to have originated in the packing material of some statues that were imported from Italy to Oxford, hence its alternative name of ‘Oxford Weed’. It was a very popular addition to the walled gardens that were being built everywhere at this time but, in the way of things, it didn’t take long before it was advancing over the walls of inhabited places all over the country. Other vernacular names include ‘Mother of Thousands’ and ‘Travelling Sailor’, which attest to its colonising zeal. It covered the walls of Kenilworth Castle so vigorously that yet another name for it is ‘Kenilworth Ivy’. There is a lovely description of Ivy-leaved Toadflax in medieval times on the Highbury Wildlife Garden website:

“In Reading the Landscape of Europe, May Theilgaard Watts calls it Runes-de-Rome: “This plant is a part of every medieval city wall’ in France. “Clinging to the massive masonry that lifts Chateaudun above the Loire Valley, it undoubtedly felt the breath of molten lead poured on the enemy from the apertures above and received many a misdirected arrow from below.”

The plant seems to like the scabbiest, most broken-down walls, maybe because these contain the greatest variety of crevices and cracks. Richard Mabey notes that it is ‘virtually unknown in natural habitats in this country’.

In its native Italy, Ivy-leaved Toadflax is known as ‘the plant of the Madonna’. It is also said to be edible: it is described in old herbals as ‘anti-scorbutic’, which means that it is high in vitamin C, and has been eaten in salads. Its flavour is described as being similar to cress. I can imagine that those little flowers would look very pretty too, although taking them would mean depriving the bees of their nectar – like most plants with ‘snapdragon’-shaped flowers, it is insect-pollinated.

This leaves me with just one question. Why is a Toadflax called a Toadflax? The answer is lost in history, but one explanation is that the flower looks like the wide-mouthed face of a toad. Another is that the flower looks like a whole toad! There is also a theory that toads liked to shelter amongst the leaves, which, as they also like the crevices in drystone walls, seems to me the likeliest of the explanations. At any rate, having noticed Ivy-leaved Toadflax, I am now seeing it everywhere, and will certainly tell you if I spot any toads.

 

 

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Dear Readers, during a walk in Coldfall Wood last week, I was surprised to see a stand of Fringecups alongside the stream. They are a member of the Saxifrage family, although they look very different from the others, with their strange green-pink flowers peering like giraffes over their neighbours. They are the sole member of their genus, and as such are somewhat out on a limb: most saxifrages are five-petalled, open-flowered plants, although a few do share the long stem of the Fringecup. As the flowers grow older, they start to change from greenish-white to pink, and even to red.

This is a plant that my North American readers might recognise, as it is a native of the north-western corner of the continent, including Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Alberta and British Columbia. It is a plant of woody, shady, wet places, and in my garden at least the bees are very fond of those unassuming flowers.

Here in the wood, they have certainly made themselves at home. They mix happily with the nettles, the violets and the marsh marigolds, and keep themselves largely to themselves. It is not difficult to see how it has made the leap into ‘the wild’ – I have it in my own garden, and there are many varieties for sale. Its tolerance of shade is a great point in its favour in many people’s eyes.

I think that this looks like a fairy-tale plant, ethereal and delicate. The flowers look as if they could be hats for pixies, and, indeed, there is a Canadian folktale that elves ate Fringecup in order to improve their night vision. The First Nation Skagit people used Fringecup to make a tea for treating many illnesses, including loss of appetite.

In many of the books that mention Fringecups, there is a reference to its fragrance. I have to admit that this was not something that I’d noticed so, in the interests of research, I went down to the garden to have a sniff. And there it is, a faint hint of sweetness, as fragile as the scent left on a  silk scarf. This is a modest plant of strange and elusive beauty, which only reveals itself if you have the time to stop and look.

 

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Dear Readers, a few weeks ago we had a look at Lesser Celandine, that delicate flower of shady woodland with the heart-shaped leaves and the daisy-like flowers. Today, the Greater Celandine is popping up all over my garden. It has seeded itself in one of my terracotta pots, taken up residence by my side-door and is giving the Yellow Corydalis a run for its money in my side return. In short, this is a much bolder plant than its namesake, a plant of bright light and poor soil.

Lesser and Greater Celandine are from completely different plant families. Lesser Celandine is a  buttercup, but Greater Celandine is a poppy. Like all of the poppy family, the plant has four petals. It also has a distinctive bright orange, latex-like sap, which is poisonous and irritating to the skin.

The petals drop off at the mere touch of a hand, it seems, and the seedpods develop at a startling rate.

Greater Celandine was named for the Swallow (Chelidon), as it is said to bloom when they arrive, and to fade when they leave (unlike the Lesser Celandine, which is finished before the birds even turn up). There was also an ancient legend that Swallows used the flower to restore the sight of their fledglings. Why the babies needed their sight restored in the first place is lost in history, but it was believed to be useful for human eye complaints.Putting such an astringent substance into the eyes would seem to be counter-intuitive, but on the wonderful Poison Garden website,  John Robertson has an explanation:

‘……in Anglo-Saxon Medicine, M. L. Cameron explains that, when being used as an eye salve, recipes including celandine require it to be heated skilfully to become lukewarm. It is mixed with honey and the heating must take place in a brass or copper pot. The heating reduced the irritant nature of the celandine and the honey and copper salts from the pot were bactericidal so the remedy may have had some efficacy. The heating needed to be done skilfully to avoid burning.’

What the latex is useful for, however, is the curing of warts. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey states that only Comfrey and Feverfew have more statements of efficacy from the people who contributed to the volume. It has also been used for toothache (by no less a person than Queen Elizabeth I) and as a purgative.

Under the Doctrine of Signatures (which we have discussed before, here and here), the bile-coloured sap was said to give an indication that the plant could be used for liver disorders. However, in 1999 ten people were admitted to hospital with acute hepatitis following the ingestion of a remedy made with Greater Celandine. This is an indication of the need to be extremely sure what you are doing before experimenting with the powers of the plant kingdom.

For all its long history of medicinal use, Greater Celandine is not a native plant: along with Fallow Deer, Horse Chestnuts and central heating, it is believed to have been introduced by our old friends, the Romans. However, it has made itself very much at home with us, and is seldom found far from human habitation, like a kind of floral House Sparrow. For reasons that escape me, it is the birthday flower for October 9th, by which time it will be well and truly asleep for the year. However, for the time being it is in its prime, and I advise any readers who have not had a good look at it to stop to admire its bright little face. It’s enough to cheer up any wait at the bus stop.

 

 

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

I am finding Garlic Mustard everywhere at the moment – in the cemetery, along the edge of the allotments, everywhere that is damp and shady. I also found it in the hedgerows of Somerset, where it seems very at home, peeking out from a mass of bluebells, nettles and stitchwort, and living up to its alternative name of Jack-by-the-hedge.  Its leaves are a most toothsome shade of pale green, and smell slightly of garlic when crushed. The four-petalled flowers are in a cross or  ‘cruciform’ shape (hence ‘crucifers’): this is an indicator that we are dealing with a member of the Brassica, or cabbage family. Many of this family share Garlic Mustard’s pungency: some have that familiar school-dinners sulphur smell when squashed or cooked, and other have the stronger notes of mustard or horseradish. Human beings appear to have been using Garlic Mustard to spice their food for a very long time: seeds of the plant were found in pots that are over 6000 years old, along with mammal and fish remains, suggesting that some kind of stew had been made with Garlic Mustard as a flavouring. The plant has much higher Vitamin A and Vitamin C levels than most commercially-grown fruit and vegetables (8,600 units/100g and 190 mcg/100g respectively), and so would have been an excellent choice as a pot-herb or flavouring.

The mustard flavour is not there for our benefit, of course. Deer seem to dislike the taste, and so it goes largely unforaged. However, the scent attracts the midges and hoverflies that are its main pollinators. It is also the foodplant of the Orange-tip Butterfly caterpillar, and the long green larvae particularly like the seed pods of the plant. The caterpillars  seem to be perfectly matched, in shape and colour,  to the seedpods, which are their favourite part of the plant.

I saw my first Orange-tip butterflies today, jousting above a patch of Garlic Mustard. I shall have to go back later to see if I can see any eggs. They are the colour of barley-sugar, as elegant as the butterfly that made them.

In the UK, Garlic Mustard is part of a mix of woodland flora, and behaves like a responsible part of the plant community. In eastern North America, however, it has become something of a problem plant. In the UK, 69 species of insect feed on the plant, but across the Atlantic nothing does. Occasionally, butterflies that are related to our Orange-tip lay their eggs on the plant, because it looks similar to native crucifers, but the larvae sicken and die. Deer mostly disdain Garlic Mustard, as they do here. Furthermore, the plant seems to produce chemicals which inhibit the growth of other plants. This chemical warfare doesn’t happen in the plant’s natural range, possibly because defences have evolved to keep everything in balance. However, I note that Garlic Mustard was first imported to America as a food plant in 1800, and wonder whether it has always been a problem, or if something else has changed which has made it more vigorous than it was previously? As always, these things are not simple.

However, it’s fair to say that the plant is being given a run for its money. There are Garlic Mustard Pulling competitions, where different areas compete to see how much of the plant they can eradicate. There are many recipes online for tasty ways to use Garlic Mustard once you’ve pulled it up: here is a Garlic Mustard Roulade  and here we have some Garlic Mustard Hummous. Both of these sound rather good, and would be fun if you have a superabundance of the plant. More drastic measures include the application of herbicides such as glyphosate, and even use of controlled fires.  But I suspect that, in the end, the plant and its environment will come to some kind of accommodation, even if the timescale is one that humans will find it rather difficult to live with. Having taken a living thing from its normal habitat for our own purposes, we are now left with the consequences of our actions. Let’s hope that the remedy doesn’t prove worst than the disease.

 

 

 

 

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Dear Readers, not far from where I live is a road called The Bishop’s Avenue, which has been in the news recently. It is home to some of the most enormous, pretentious, overblown dwellings in the country (guide price for one recently – £45 million). Furthermore, many of the houses are barely used, being retained as boltholes by people with lots of money who live in the more volatile parts of the world. Some of the properties are literally falling down which is obscene when you consider how many people are desperate for a home of their own. The Bishop’s Avenue exemplifies everything that is bad about what’s happening to the city that I love. But, as many of the houses continue their slow disintegration into ruin, the verges and wasteland that surround them are becoming increasingly fascinating to those with an interest in plants, and the way that they colonise newly-available spaces.

So it was that anyone waiting at the traffic lights on Sunday would have seen me positively dancing about with delight, because there, amongst a positive scrum of opportunistic plants, was a single Borage.

Why do I love Borage so much? Well, it is bright blue, and furry, and has an exquisite pointed flower that reminds me of a hummingbird. It is the plant par excellence for bees – not only is it so full of nectar that if you nibble a bloom it gives you a little hit of sweetness, but the nectar replenishes itself within two minutes of being drained. Furthermore, it is a member of my very favourite plant family (yes, I know you aren’t supposed to have favourites, but hey), the Boraginaceae, which also includes Comfrey in its many forms, Green Alkanet, Viper’s Bugloss, Lungwort and all the Forget-me-nots.

Borage has been in cultivation in the UK since at least 1200 – its leaves and flowers were much used as a herb, and were included in fruit cups for their cucumber flavour. It was first recorded in the wild in 1777. It is used as a vegetable in many places along the Mediterranean, where it is a native plant, and also in the ‘Green Sauce’ of Frankfurt.

Borage is also the richest known plant source of GLA (Gamma-linolenic Acid). The ‘Starflower Oil’ that can be purchased in chemists is made from Borage. Traditionally, it was used as a cure for melancholy, and also as a supplement for women suffering from PMS or menopausal symptoms. Borage leaves have also been used as a poultice for swellings, in the same way as those of its cousin, Comfrey.

It is also said to be an excellent companion plant, distracting tomato worms from their preferred hosts, and, of course, attracting a host of pollinators.

Borage is a wonderful plant for bees. It has the alternative names of ‘bee bread’ and ‘bee flower’, and these are apt descriptions.

I am fast running out of space for plants in my north-facing back garden, but it seems to me that I’ll have to have a pot of borage in my front garden, where it gets the sun and the bees can enjoy it. After all, who knows how long the wild plant that I saw will have to enjoy its moment of flowering? It can’t be too long before some developer plonks a twenty-bedroomed house on top of it.

 

 

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

Dear Readers, most of the flowers of early spring are rather delicate, pastel-coloured plants, subtle and self-effacing. Well, this could never be said of the Marsh Marigold, which has burst forth across the muddy riverbeds of the Everglades in Coldfall Wood like a positive wash of sunshine.

Also known as Kingcup, Marsh Marigold is not a marigold at all – the name comes from Mary Gold, and refers to its use in medieval churches as a tribute to the Virgin Mary –  but a buttercup. And what a buttercup! I love the slight shininess of the petals, the exuberance of the gently-opening stamen, and the way that hoverflies seem to fall onto them in a positive swoon of appreciation for their generosity.

Although you might think that its sheer tropical boldness implies that this plant hales from warmer climes, it is in fact one of the most ancient of our native plants – Richard Mabey speaks of how, unlike most flowering plants, it survived the glaciations of the last ice age, and flourished in the marshy meltwaters. Its longevity as part of the plant community of these islands is reflected in its wide variety of vernacular names: Mayblobs, Mollyblobs, Water-blobs and, my personal favourite, The Publican. I guess that these names reflect the solidity of the plant, and the sense of hospitality that comes with the abundance of bright flowers. Once, when there were more meadows and cattle wallows, this plant must have been by far the boldest and most obvious sign that spring had finally come, more so than the delicate primroses and lesser celandine and wood anemones. It is like a great trumpet-blast of optimism wherever it grows.

The plant has a special place in the hearts of the citizens of the Isle of Man, where many plant rituals survived for much longer than in mainland Britain. Marsh Marigolds were strewn on doorsteps on May Eve, and it is brought into the house as a symbol of spring, and as a way of blessing the house. In England, there was also a belief that it was protective against malignant fairies and other little folk of bad intent, and  Marsh Marigolds would be picked on the evening of 30th April and dropped through every letter box to dissuade the fey folk from any mischief. Cattle were also garlanded in Marsh Marigolds as a protection against the evil eye, even though it is actually poisonous to cattle.

In Latvia, Marsh Marigold is known as Gundega, a word that means ‘burning fire’. This is presumably because of the dermatitis that can be caused by handling the plant – like all buttercups, some people have an adverse reaction to its sap. In spite of this, it has had some culinary uses – Queen Victoria is said to have enjoyed boiled mutton with ‘capers-with-a-difference’, the difference being that the ‘capers’ were the buds of Marsh Marigold. To confuse matters somewhat, in North America, where the plant is native in the north-east, it is sometimes known as Cowslip, and the leaves were cooked by early settlers as a vegetable, in spite of the plant’s poisonous nature.

The Iroquois also used this plant as an antidote to someone who had imbibed a love potion. My source, the ‘Plant Lives‘ website, states that it seemed to make the lovestruck swain ‘very sick’. I suspect this would rather have taken the shine off of any passionate feelings that they might have been developing.

What is particularly magical to me about Marsh Marigold is the way that, after flowering, it completely disappears. I have one in my pond, and every year I am anxious in case it doesn’t grow, so complete is its vanishing act. And then, in just a few weeks, the juicy green leaves appear, followed by the fat round buds, and eventually the butter-coloured flowers. Of course, this is the way of many plants, but it is the one that I am always most relieved to see. It feels as if, on some level, the great pulse of the world is still working.

 

Every Wednesday, I hope to find a new ‘weed’ to investigate. My only criterion will be that I will not have deliberately planted the subject of our inquiry. Who knows what we will find…..

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 in 1700, 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).

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.