Dear Readers, every year I look forward to the flowering of this Cabbage Palm on the County Roads here in East Finchley. On a calm, sunny day, I can smell its sweet scent from my office window, but today, sadly, it’s spitting with rain and there is not a whiff to be had. Normally it’s also covered with bees, but any self-respecting bee is, I hope, in bed with a good book.

I first wrote about this plant several years ago, in 2019. I still find this New Zealand native astonishing, both for its hardiness and for the wide range of uses to which it has been put. Have a read below.

Dear Readers, the cabbage palm is a plant that I have always been a little snooty about. For much of the year it just stands there, with its big leathery leaves, and looks rather out of place. But this year, this one in the County Roads of East Finchley has burst forth with three huge inflorescences. I stood there with my camera, breathing in the sweet scent and watching dozens of honeybees flying about, and realised that I had been completely wrong. This is a very fine tree indeed.

The cabbage palm is endemic to New Zealand, where the largest known tree is estimated to be over 400 years old, and has a height of 56 feet and a circumference of 30 feet. The fruit that follows the flowers is the favourite food of the New Zealand pigeon or kereru (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae), who is also endemic. I am fascinated by New Zealand and its unique wildlife, and I think that I shall have to visit at some point!

The flowers are eaten by the kakariki or New Zealand parakeet, a very attractive small parrot. I wonder if our ring-necked parakeets will start to recognise the plant as a source of food? They have certainly already developed a taste for spring blossom.

Cabbage palms grow in a variety of habitats in their native country, with different varieties occupying different niches. However, young plants are not frost-hardy (which means that it is limited as to altitude) and need open spaces to thrive – they will not survive if they are overtopped by other plants. The seedlings need a lot of water, and so the plant is not found on steep hills or among sand dunes unless there is underground water. The cabbage palm also needs fertile soil, and when European settlers first arrived in New Zealand they would use the presence of cabbage palms to indicate where to set up their farms and homesteads. This is probably why the ‘jungles of cabbage trees’ described by those settlers no longer exist – these days, cabbage palms are much more likely to be individual trees.

The nectar from the cabbage palm has compounds that make it attractive to moths as well as to bees, and I have seen our local tree surrounded by fluttery figures on a warm night. Bees use the nectar to stoke their developing hives, Each stalk on a cabbage palm bears a flower on alternate years, so there tends to be a heavy flowering every other year, and a bumper crop every three to five years. I suspect that this is a bumper year. One inflorescence can carry up to 40,000 seeds which are rich in linoleic acid (an important compound in the egg-laying of birds). Given that young plants need open space to grow well, it’s no wonder that the plant has developed to have its seeds transported away by the New Zealand pigeon, who will hopefully deposit it a good long way away from its parent (with a handy parcel of fertiliser to boot).

Much as the oak tree is a ‘mother tree’ to many British species, and constitutes a whole ecosystem in itself, so the cabbage palm is home to a whole variety of other species. Epiphytes such as orchids, ferns such as our old friend the Asplenium  and a whole fieldguide full of lichens and liverworts live on the plant.

The gold-striped gecko (Woodworthia chrysosiretica) scuttles over the bark, and New Zealand bellbirds nest under the leaves

Long-tailed bats roost in the hollow branches.

In winter the leaves are an excellent hiding-place for the weta, a giant flightless cricket and one of the largest insects in the world.

There are nine species of insects who are only found on the cabbage palm in New Zealand, including the cabbage tree moth (Epiphryne verriculata) which eats nothing else. The adult is camouflaged so that it can hide on the dead leaves of the plant. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a stripey moth.

As you might expect from a plant that has been so utterly entwined with the other inhabitants of New Zealand, the Maori people have a long relationship with the cabbage palm. The stems and rhizomes are rich in natural sugars, and were steamed in earth ovens to provide a sweet substance called kauru that was used to sweeten other foods. It was easily stored for long periods, and is said to taste like molasses.

The cabbage palm groves attracted thousands of pigeons, and the Maori would trap and eat these birds – they were often so fat that they couldn’t fly.

The fibre from the leaves was incredibly tough, and especially resilient in seawater, being used to make anchor ropes and swings. They were also used to make protective trousers for when people were travelling in the high country of the South Island, home to the prickly spear grasses.

Medicinally, different parts of the plant were used for everything from diarrhoea to colic.

Although the cabbage palm rarely sets seed in the UK, individual plants do often seem to appear in the ‘wild’ – the plant is the fifteenth commonest ‘alien’ plant in London according to Stace and Crawley’s book ‘Alien Plants’. In the Isles of Scilly, the cabbage palm is used as a shelter for the bulb fields, and it is generally a plant of the milder south west of England, where it is sometimes known as the ‘Torquay Palm’. I see that there has recently been a thinning out of the various ‘palm’ trees of Torquay by the local council, with a concomitant furore. Let’s hope that all is well by the start of the summer season.

There are also cabbage palms on the west coast of Ireland, a similarly mild spot.

In its native land, the cabbage palm has been threatened by a variety of pests and diseases. In 1987, populations of the plant sickened and died, often within a year of the first symptoms being noticed. Sudden Decline was eventually found to have been caused by a bacterium transmitted by a non-native sapsucking insect, the passion vine hopper, and there is some hope that the disease is lessening. However, individual cabbage palms are sometimes victims of what has been named ‘Rural Decline’. When the forests of the plant were originally cleared, individual specimens were left as shelter for livestock. Unfortunately, said livestock ate the seedlings and rubbed against the bark, eventually damaging the tree beyond hope of survival. Rabbits, possums and even horses also have a liking for the sweet stems and fruit. The cabbage palm’s richness as a source for other organisms seems to be hastening its demise in New Zealand, though the population is still at a healthy level at the moment.

Furthermore, the cabbage palm is very widely cultivated, both as a pot plant and as ‘bedding’ in many council flowerbeds. It is strange to think that this most individual of plants, so firmly embedded in the country from which it comes, is pretty much unremarked. I am looking at the cabbage palm with much more respect these days. What a very fine plant it is!

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Duncan – originally posted to Flickr as Kereru, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7903580

Photo Two by By Duncan Wright – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3020473

Photo Three by By Sid Mosdell from New Zealand – Bellbird, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21871769

Photo Four from https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/bats-pekapeka/long-tailed-bat/

Photo Five by By Mary Morgan-Richards – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70677446

Photo Six by By Dan Kluza – https://www.flickr.com/photos/72744226@N00/5398604491, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65837571

 

Dear Readers, when I was in the Azores last week, it felt as if every second open space was festooned and draped with Lantana, one of the IUCM’s 100 Worst Invasive Species, though a particularly pretty one.  This designation puts Lantana right up there with Japanese knotweed and the malarial mosquito, so it’s not a good sign. The battle against Lantana has been a long one, as you’ll see from my 2019 post below, and the plant is particularly destructive when it colonises an island full of delicately-poised endemic species, such as the Azores or (possibly even worse) the Galapagos. This is, however, a very interesting plant. Have a read below and see what you think. 

Dear Readers, anyone who has ever visited a tropical butterfly house will have come across lantana. There are about 150 species, but the one that’s mostly seen is Lantana camara, otherwise known as Spanish Flag. It comes in a wide variety of colours – the orange one shown above seems to be the commonest. The flowers change colour as they mature, leading to multicoloured umbels – in the plant above they varied through apricot to tomato-red, with the lighter-hued blooms being the ones that have not yet been pollinated. There are many, many varieties, including the rather more demure one below.

One thing is for sure: these plants are a butterfly magnet. They form part of a genus of 150 different species in the Verbena family, and are native to tropical regions of the Americas and Africa: I saw Lantana growing wild when I was in Costa Rica. A wide range of butterfly and moth species feed on the flowers, especially swallowtails and birdwings, skippers and brush-footed butterflies such as the glasswing butterfly (Greta oro) of Central America, shown below.

 

Furthermore, the seeds of lantana are loved by birds, and herein hangs a tale. Lantana is considered a noxious weed in many parts of the world where it has been introduced, notably Australia, South Africa and some parts of Asia. It has also become naturalised in the warmer parts of North America. Because the leaves of the plant are toxic to herbivores, most grazers and browsers won’t eat them (and become sick if they do). Meantime, the birds eat the berries and distribute the seeds in their droppings. Among the species that eat the seeds are the superb fairy wren (Malurus cyaneus) of Australia;

and the endemic Mauritius Bulbul (Hypsipetes olivaceus)

In Australia, lantana has become so prevalent that various insect controls have been tried in order to reduce its vigour. Of the thirty species introduced, some have become problems in their own right. The rather handsome Mexican lantana bug (Aconophora compressa)  was brought to Australia in 1995, in the hope that it would munch its way through the plants that it was named after. Alas, the lantana bug has extensive and varied tastes, and has eaten many plants that were not supposed to be on the menu, including the popular ornamental trees fiddlewoods (also from the Americas), which are related to lantana. The case of the lantana bug led to much greater testing of the appetites of proposed bio-remedial species: this insect was tested with 62 species to see if it ate any of them, but fiddlewoods were not included.

So, lantana continues to run riot in many parts of the world where there are no pests to contain it, though I was cheered to hear that the swamp wallaby (Wallabia bicolor) is one of the few mammals that can eat the leaves without keeling over.

I was also happy to hear that in some places in Australia, lantana is actually increasing biodiversity. In urban green spaces, it provides nesting cover for birds such as the fairy wren in the absence of native species that will do the same thing, and so provides a refuge for these attractive little birds to reproduce. Urban areas are not pristine habitats, as a brisk walk around East Finchley will show: we have plants from all over the world here, and the insects and birds take advantage of the longer flowering period and range of different microhabitats. It’s a very different thing in an endangered habitat. As Stace says in his book ‘Alien Plants’:

‘In disturbed native forests, Prickly Lantana can quickly become the dominant understorey species, disrupting succession and decreasing biodiversity. At some sites, infestations have been so persistent that they have completely stalled the regeneration of rainforests for more than three decades‘.

A plant out of its own habitat, without the native pests that keep in check, can quickly become an environmental disaster. Plus, lantana produces chemicals in its roots that check the growth of other plants. In areas with cold winters, the plant doesn’t survive, but if I was planning on growing it, I would choose one of the sterile varieties that are available that don’t produce fruit.

Lantana leaves have been used medicinally for a wide range of complaints, including malaria, tetanus and rheumatism. They are also believed to be efficacious in cases of snakebite. In India, where lantana is particularly invasive in mountain regions, local people have been making furniture from the plant, as it is considered a good substitute for traditional materials such as bamboo. Because of the toxicity of the lantana, the furniture is also not eaten by termites and beetle larvae. In an IUCN report, it indicates that using lantana in this way has increased income and productive work days for the villagers who are involved. The problem now is a shortage of people with skills to create the furniture.

Now, have a look at the image below and see if you can guess who it’s by.

At first glance, I thought it was a photograph, but subsequent research revealed that the image, called ‘Tithorea harmonia in Lantana’ from 2009-10, is actually a faithful reproduction in oils of a photographic image. And I was very surprised to find that the artist was Damien Hirst. Of this series of paintings that aim to reproduce photographs, Hirst says;

“I want you to believe in them in the same way as you believe in the ‘Medicine Cabinets‘. I don’t want them to look clever, but to convince you. I’m using painting to produce something that looks like a bad quality reproduction – the painting process is hidden as it is in my work ‘Hymn’, which looks like plastic, but is bronze underneath.”[2]

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: Hirst has long been fascinated by butterflies and other insects, and has used them extensively in his art. Usually, it hasn’t ended very happily for them, as in the image below, where real dead butterflies are stuck onto gloss paint (to be fair, I believe that Hirst acquired them when they were already dead).

To me, his relationship with animals has always been strictly functional – he uses them to prove a wider philosophical point, as in his famous piece ‘A Thousand Years’, where maggots hatch, feed on a cow’s head and are killed in an Insect-o-cuter. Another exhibit at Tate Modern in 2012 featured live butterflies who hatched, flew around and died, next to an exhibit of the gloss paint and dead butterfly paintings. And then, of course, there was the shark.

It’s interesting how Hirst has gone from being the Enfant Terrible with the shark in a tank to someone who reproduces photos in oil paints, but he has never been afraid to experiment and to change. I suppose that his early work, in particular, is difficult to ignore – I saw his ‘Mother and Child Divided’ in an exhibition in Oslo in the ’90’s, and found it both fascinating and deeply distressing. For me, he sums up everything that is wrong with our attitude to the rest of the living world; everything is there to be plundered and used for our entertainment. But for others the fact that he raises these questions is part of his appeal. He has always been polarising: for some, the most interesting of the Young British Artists of the 1980’s, for others a cynical showman. I would be very interested to hear what you think!

And finally, a poem. I can’t tell you how much I love this work by Grace Paley, especially her evocation of ‘sadness and hilarity’. I know exactly how that feels, having been alternately laughing and weeping for most of the past six months.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Eddy Van 3000 from in Flanders fields – Belgiquistan – United Tribes ov Europe – the wings-become-windows butterfly., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3479928

Photo Two by By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12075434

Photo Three by By Josh Noseworthy – Mauritius Bulbul, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36538595

Photo Four by By James Niland from Brisbane, Australia – Lantana TreehopperUploaded by Lymantria, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24777384

Photo Five by By Vinayaraj – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27369697

Photo Six by By jjron – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4022225

Photo Seven by By RickP 12:16, 3 May 2006 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=753347

Photo Eight from https://tudelft.openresearch.net/page/15576/15-lantana-furniture-siruvani-india

Photo Nine from www.damienhirst.com/tithorea-harmonia-in-lantana

Photo Ten from http://www.damienhirst.com/for-boys-and-girls

Photo Eleven from http://www.damienhirst.com/the-physical-impossibility-of

Photo Twelve from http://www.damienhirst.com/mother-and-child-divided-ex

 

Dear Readers, at this time of year Herb Bennet appears (pretty vigorously if my garden is anything to go by) and causes all sorts of confusion. It’s such a delicate little thing, a member of the rose family and not too distantly related to the strawberry, and yet once it gets going you will find it popping up everywhere. Fittingly for a north-facing garden, it doesn’t  seem to mind the shade. I have a great fondness for the seedheads, which remind me of the miniature ‘hair-dos’ of clematis.

I note that in my original Wednesday Weed piece, written in 2015, I rather passed over the details of the medicinal virtues of the plant, but having recently acquired a Culpeper’s Herbal I can reveal that Culpeper described the plant as ‘governed by Jupiter, and that gives hopes of a wholesome, healthful herb’. The whole of the next paragraph sounds positively rhapsodic, and here’s just a sample:

‘The decoction also being drunk comforts the heart, and strengthens the stomach, and a cold brain, and therefore is good in the springtime to open obstructions of the liver; and helps the wind colic. It also helps those who have fluxes, or are bursten, or have a rupture….It is very safe, you need have no dose prescribed; and it is very fit to be kept in everyone’s house’. 

I find myself very moved by all this. In a time when medicine was hit or miss at the best, how reassuring this little plant with its multiple virtues must have been! And while it would be easy to find the idea of people ‘bursten’ or ‘having fluxes’ as slightly comic, I am of a serious humour today, and find myself empathising with people who were trying to live their lives in the midst of all sorts of pain and contagion, and with very little to help them outside of the herbalist and the apothecary. The thought of being able to gather something for free that might help must have been so comforting, and who knows what difference this humble herb would have made?

Another interesting thing that I’ve discovered since my original post concerns the plant’s Latin name, Geum urbanum. This always struck me as a rather strange name for a plant that’s an ancient woodland indicator, but it appears that Herb Bennet is often seen as an urban ‘weed’ on the streets of Stockholm and Oslo, and indeed in Edinburgh. Linnaeus, who named it, was a very observant man, and I don’t believe that the species name ‘urbanum‘ came out of nowhere. So, here we have a plant at home in the deepest, darkest wood, and growing out of the pavement. What a plant!

As I may have mentioned before, I’m not a botanist. In order to identify a plant that has appeared in the garden, I usually have to allow it to bloom before I can even start to put a name to it. And so it was with this delicate, straggly yellow flower, which turned up for the first time this year. At first, I wondered if it was some kind of buttercup, or even a renegade yellow strawberry. But eventually I worked out that it is a Herb Bennet, or Wood Avens, a member of the rose family and closely related to the cinquefoils and, yes, the strawberries.

The name ‘Herb Bennet’ comes from the word Benedictus, so the whole plant is seen as a blessing. Hanging the plant up above your door was said to protect against evil spirits, and also against venomous snakes and rabid dogs. These virtues were absorbed into the early Christian tradition: the plant has three leaves, said to reflect the Holy Trinity, and, usually, five petals, reminiscent of the Five Wounds of Christ. I say usually because my plant appears to have six petals. It was also thought to be associated with St Benedict, who formed the Benedictine order of monks.

The roots of the plant apparently have a clove-like smell, which has been used to flavour ale, and to deter clothes moths. The root, which had to be picked by 25th March in order to retain its vital qualities,  has been used to treat everything from diarrhoea to fever to headache. The lovely foraging site Celtnet suggests using it as a pot herb, or as a clove substitute in apple pie.

Herb Bennet, like Pendulous Sedge last week, is a plant of ancient woodland. Again, I am intrigued by the way that it has turned up in the garden for the first time. The seeds of this plant are normally transported by animals:

As you can see, the seedheads are covered in tiny hooks, and these can be transported from place to place on clothing, or in the fur of dogs, cats and rabbits. So, did my plant arrive attached to a wandering cat who had previously been in Coldfall Wood, and set up home because the conditions were right? I fear I will never know, but again I wonder if the land beneath my feet remembers that less than a hundred and fifty years ago, it was a wood too. Whatever the reason, I am very happy to be hosting this little plant, with its long tradition of culinary and medicinal blessings.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, as you remember I was in Canons Park in Edgware at the weekend, and was completely amazed by the sheer volume of wild garlic (or ramsons as they’re also known). As I mentioned, one lady stopped to pull up a single handful of the plant, and in truth that’s quite enough for some pesto or to flavour a loaf. I used to find it growing along a lane in Somerset when I used to visit my Aunt Hilary, but it doesn’t grow in my local wood, in spite of it being an ancient woodland indicator, probably due to all the trampling.

Below is a piece I wrote back in 2018 with lots more information about this interesting allium, but first, here’s another ramson poem, by Jo Bell. I love it! See what you think.

Working Pair
by Jo Bell

I have asked for a poem about love.
The woman I have asked to write this poem
knows nothing about love.

Of boats, she knows a little.
When she tries to write of love
it often looks exactly like a boat; and so

she found herself remembering a rusty day
in Birmingham. From an arm of water known,
and so invisible, to all the city drinkers

came the slow nose of a narrowboat –
Aries, heading for the Old Turn Junction
at an angle made for public pain.

But then behind her, shark-smooth,
slid the snub-nosed Malus
hitched on short lines so that both boats

took the corner in a perfect coupling,
right as knee or elbow. The first
was pushed around the narrow turn:

the second paused, then took the rope
and both moved on. Each line and angle,
each response and strain was halved

and doubled. This is of course
a clumsy metaphor. The woman I asked
to write this poem knows that,

but it is the best way she can find
to show how, moving light or laden,
two bodies could help each other

so that both are more than helpful;
each is needful to the other’s passage.
She cannot write a piece that will explain

the love that I’ve laid down for you, my love
in ramson and in bramble season, through our days
of rush and rest, of hills and homecomings.
I had not known there was a home to come to, till you came.

Dear Readers, during a very wet walk in Somerset last week, I was delighted to see that the wild garlic is already putting in an appearance. I couldn’t help myself – I had to stop and pluck a leaf and take a little nibble. I love the delicate flavour of wild garlic, but by spring the whole of this lane will have a distinct whiff of allium, and the leaves will be topped with a froth of white flowers.

I was delighted to learn that the species name, ursinum, comes from the brown bear’s habit of digging up the bulbs and eating them. I suppose if you’re walking through the woods and get a blast of onion breath it might be your cue to head up a tree at speed. Wild garlic often grows alongside bluebells, and both are known as indicators of ancient woodland (woodland that existed before 1600) – both plants spread slowly, and so if they are present in a wood, it means that the wood has been there for a considerable period of time.

Wild garlic is also known as ramsons (often misremembered as ‘ransoms’) or buckram, and is native to the UK and to the rest of Europe and Asia. The Old English root name for the plant, hramsa, appears in place names such as Ramsbottom and Ramsey Island, which I had previously thought related to sheep rather than a plant. It can indeed be an invasive little number (indeed, the vernacular name ‘ramsons’ comes from the same root as ‘rampant’), and when I was treasurer at Culpeper City Garden in Islington, I remember how we were inundated with the stuff for a season. Our lovely volunteers managed to dig most of it out, but it was very hard work.

It appears that I took a chance with my nibble, as it has been known for people to mistake the poisonous leaves of the lily-of-the-valley or the arum lily for the edible leaves of our plant. The scent test (rubbing the leaf and smelling the fingers to check for the garlicky smell) is a good way of identifying an individual plant but won’t help with subsequent plants. Fortunately, once the flowers are out everything is clear. Unfortunately, by this time the flavour has changed from ‘subtle’ to ‘brash’.

There is a limit to how much of the plant anyone wants to take home, although it has been growing in popularity as a culinary ingredient just lately, and it sometimes feels as if I’m tripping over wild garlic pesto every time I go to a posh restaurant. However, it’s not just about the pesto, as you will see from the fine selection of recipes here.

I was interested to find out that the plant has also been used as fodder, although like most members of the onion family it taints the milk produced by the cows and goats who feed on it. In Switzerland, garlic-scented butter made use of this natural feature, and was apparently quite popular. I am reminded of an episode from ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ by Thomas Hardy, where the cows eat wild garlic in the orchard and ruin their milk, so Tess and Angel Clare end up working together with the rest of the village to clear the plant. Hardy is not my favourite author, but I do love the set pieces that he creates, and I must admit that since spending so much time in Dorset with my parents I am warming to his descriptions of the countryside and the people and animals that live there.

Like most alliums, wild garlic also has a whole raft of medicinal properties: it is antibacterial, and is said to be the best of all the onion and garlic family for lowering blood pressure (unless you’ve let it get out of hand in your garden of course). A 17th Century saying has it that if you :

Wild garlic was also a useful source of Vitamin C, and was said to have been taken to many parts of Europe by the Vikings: in Finland, it was planted at the ports and around the harbours to make it easy to pick and take on board. It was believed by the Vikings to protect against the evil eye, and of course we know how useful garlic is against vampires.

For my poem this week, I’ve chosen one by the Welsh poet Leslie Norris, who died in 2006. His poem honours fellow poet Edward Thomas, whose poems conjure the British countryside, wild garlic and all.

Ransoms (for Edward Thomas)What the white ransoms did was to wipe away The dry irritation of a journey half across England. In the warm tiredness of dusk they lay Like moonlight fallen clean onto the grass,And I could not pass them. I wound Down the window for them and for the still Falling dark to come in as they would, And then remembered that this was your hill,Your precipitous beeches, your wild garlic. I thought of you walking up from your house And your heartbreaking garden, melancholy Anger sending you into this kinder darkness, And the shining ransoms bathing the path With pure moonlight. I have my small despair And would not want your sadness; your truth, Your tragic honesty, are what I know you for. I think of a low house upon a hill, Its door closed now even to the hushing wind The tall grass bends to, and all the while The faroff salmon river without sound Runs on below; but if this vision should Be yours or mine I do not know. Pungent And clean the smell of ransoms from the wood, And I am refreshed. It was not my intent To stop on a solitary road, the night colder, Talking to a dead man, fifty years dead, But as I flick the key, hear the engine purr, Drive slowly down the hill, I’m comforted. Leslie Norris (b. 1921 d.2006)

Photo Credits

Photo One (garlic flowers) by By Kurt Stüber [1] – caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of http://www.biolib.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5352

Photo Two (ancient woodland) by No machine-readable author provided. Naturenet assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=134686

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, I don’t know if you’ve noticed (or indeed if this is happening in your neck of the woods) but there seems to be a lot of red dead-nettle about. It seems to have formed a fondness for the bottom of walls here in the County Roads in East Finchley – maybe it’s just a little bit damper there, and this is also where the very first soil seems to form, as weeds from previous years die away and are returned to the ground.

One intrepid red dead-nettle has made its home actually in the wall, a habitat that I associate more with ivy-leaved toadflax and our old friends the ‘Port and Porsch’ bellflowers. Although it looks a little white in the photo it is in fact the palest pink.

And here’s a poem! it’s by Gabriella Brand, and I love the close observation of the plant, and the new name that the children give it. See what you think…

QUILT: LAMIUM PURPUREUM

Under the magnolia tree,(a gazebo of thick pink petals)

we find a plummy crimson quilt of tiny blooms.

At first, the children and I are puzzled.

Magnolia babies, says one. Clover, guesses another.

We lie down on our bellies to get a closer look.

In dappled light we note the whorls of reddish-purplish flowers,

hooded like Capuchins with blushing faces,

leaves bent into hearts, toothy stitches, straight stem seams.

A knowing friend identifies them. Red dead-nettle, she says. No sting.

The children decide it’s a blanket for bumble bees, a sleeping bag for caterpillars.

They give it a new, less macabre, name.

Pretty Not Nettle, they call it. And it is.

And so Readers, let’s venture back to 2015, when I wrote my first ‘Wednesday Weed’ about red dead-nettle.

In East Finchley, all the Red Dead-nettle plants seem to have come into bloom at exactly the same time. Where last week there was just a clump of leaves, this week there are those tiny magenta-pink flowers, each one a complicated combination of long throat (corolla) and upper and lower lip. They seem designed to encourage a foraging bee to take a sip of nectar, with a handy landing-platform provided by the lower lip, and the stamen poised to gently tap the insect on the back, as if administering a blessing. It is also a source of pollen, especially for Queen bumblebees who are looking for food for their new offspring. This is reflected in the name given to the plant in Nottinghamshire and Lancashire – ‘Bumblebee flower’.

However, like many plants, Red Dead-nettle is not dependent on bees to reproduce. It can self-pollinate if times are hard, and ants have been observed dispersing the seeds by carrying them into their nests as food, where some of them will germinate before being eaten. A quick look at the Garden Organic website tells me that a single Red Dead-nettle can produce 27,634 viable seeds if there isn’t any competition from other plants. Such abundance! This is not surprising, as unlike its close relative White Dead-nettle, which is a perennial, Red Dead-nettle is an annual, and so has only one chance to pass on its genes. As with many things in nature, it’s lucky that not every seed or egg is able to reach adulthood or we’d soon be buried under a positive carpet of furry leaves and pink flowers.

Red Dead-nettles are plants of disturbed soils, but they are not tolerant of trampling, so they often crop up just at the edge of footpaths or other open spaces. Although it is native to continental Europe, it is thought to have been brought to the UK during the Bronze Age – remains of the plant have been found in deposits of wheat and barley from this period. It has since travelled widely with its human compatriots, and is hence found in North America and New Zealand too. Unlike many ‘weeds’ however, this is not an especially vigorous plant, and so it is not generally considered to be a problem. In addition to its value to pollinators, it is also useful for humans: the leaves and flowers can be eaten as a salad vegetable, and if you want to experience the delights of Dead-nettle and Chilli Soup or, indeed, Dead-nettle Beer, you can have a look here.

As we have seen before, the medicinal uses of plants often depend on their appearance, and Red Dead-nettle is no exception. Because of its colour, Nicholas Culpeper, the fifteenth century herbalist, considered it efficacious for any problems relating to the blood, especially menstrual problems. It’s also believed that the crushed leaves will help to staunch blood flow, which is useful if you are ever unlucky enough to walk through a particularly vengeful bramble patch en route to your destination. I also note that it is sometimes used as a treatment for piles, although Lesser Celandine is more commonly referred to as the ‘go-to’ plant for such afflictions.  Beware, however: Red Dead-nettle also has a reputation as a laxative, and, whilst browsing through the various ‘wild food’ websites on the internet I noticed several people referring to cramps and diarrhoea. So, the word here, as everywhere, is caution. On the other hand, if you have a pet tortoise, Red Dead-nettle seems to be a fine food for them.

Sometimes, it’s possible to find a more unusual flower tucked in amongst the Red Dead-nettle. This is the Cut-Leaved Dead-nettle (Lamium hybridum). Described as ‘easily overlooked’, you can see why. The main difference between this plant and Red Dead-nettle is that, as you might expect from the name, the leaves are less rounded and more deeply toothed.

Red Dead-nettle is also has an angelic alternative name – Purple Archangel. It is argued that this is because the plant comes into flower around the time of the feast of the Archangel Michael, which is on 8th May. However, the plants that I saw today are obviously having a bit of calendar trouble if this is the case. Maybe there is something about the flowers which looks a little ethereal and heaven-bound. For the bumblebees, at least, they are manna.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, I have no idea how I managed to get to 2022 without mentioning a Wednesday Weed – I’ve been writing them right from the very beginning, and it’s introduced me to many local plants that I had not previously made the acquaintance of. However, it’s easy to run out of plants, especially in the winter months, and so my attention has moved to anything that grows – ornamental plants, street trees, and favourite foods. The poem at the end  is a corker. Do have a look!

Dear Readers, it’s the short gooseberry season again, and yesterday I got  carried away and purchased not only some ordinary green  ones, but some of these rather fine red ones too. Personally I like the way that their lip-puckering sourness can be tempered with sugar and cream, and find it a perfect foil to something fatty like mackerel.  However, like liver, rhubarb and brussel sprouts it’s one of those foods that definitely splits the crowd.

Gooseberries are a member of the currant family, and have been in the UK since at least the 13th century, though they weren’t recorded in the wild until 1763. Their Latin name, Ribes uva-crispa, literally means ‘curved grape’, and they are very grape-like, apart from those prickly hairs. The name ‘goose berry’ is harder to fathom, though having seen geese munching on blackberries at Walthamstow Wetlands last week it wouldn’t surprise me if waterfowl sometimes found them a tasty snack. Some people believe that the ‘goose’ is a corruption of the word ‘groseille’ from the French word for currant, but the Oxford English Dictionary is firmly on the side of a goose being a goose. In some parts of the UK they’re known as ‘goosegogs’.

Now, how about the folkloric story that babies are found under a gooseberry bush? Charming as this is (and much easier than going through all that labour business as any mother will tell you), in the 19th century ‘gooseberry bush’ was apparently slang for pubic hair – I suspect that the hairiness of the berries probably contributed to the phrase.

I have looked in vain for the origin of the phrase ‘playing gooseberry’ (i.e accompanying a courting couple in the role of chaperone or general spoilsport). It’s first recorded in 1837, and the explanation given then is that the third party would have been ‘innocently’ involved in some other occupation (such as picking gooseberries) whilst the couple talked, while all the time taking note of everything that was said. Another interpretation is that the third party deliberately took themselves off so that the couple could be together. In all of this, the role of the poor gooseberry plant is rather obscure, but such is language – for some reason, phrases stick and their original meaning is lost in the fog. Suffice to say that when I was growing up, being a ‘gooseberry’ was considered to be being an unwanted hanger-on. Do let me know if you have or had an alternative meaning for the phrase! It all makes my head spin a little.

I also like the story from the Plant Lore website of a Dorset grandmother who used the phrase ‘may the skin of a gooseberry cover all of your enemies’. Indeed, and what a picture that conjures up! The same page describes how a cure for a stye (boil) on the eyelid was to prick it every day with the prickle from a gooseberry.  Apparently an alternative cure was to have a widow touch the stye with her gold wedding ring, which must have taken a bit of persuading.

The flowers of the gooseberry are rather unusual, purplish-brown in colour and, to my eye at least, rather alien-looking.

Originally, gooseberries come from the area to the east of France right the way through to the Himalayas and India. It’s unclear whether the Romans ever ate them, but they do seem to have had a reputation for medicinal value, with the juice being used to treat fever – one alternative English name is ‘Fea-berry’. In the wonderful ‘Modern Herbal’ by Mrs Grieves, she describes gooseberry juice as

‘sub-acid and is corrective of putrescent foods, such as mackerel or goose‘.

The leaves were thought to be a treatment for ‘gravel’ (presumably gallstones), and an infusion was thought to be useful to alleviate period pain.

The gooseberries found wild in the UK are probably the descendants of those grown for food or medicine, and are largely bird-sown, with thrushes not seeming to mind the sourness of the fruit. I wonder if birds, like cats, have no way of detecting sweetness? I shall have to investigate. Clearly they can distinguish colour, as they normally prefer ripe fruit, but I wonder if that’s because of its nutritional value rather than its taste?

Anyhow, birds are not the only creatures who like gooseberries: in North America, bears eat the berries (clearly they have a sweet tooth), and foxes, raccoons and coyotes browse the foliage. Amongst the smaller animals, in the UK the caterpillars of the magpie moth, comma butterfly and v-moth feed on the foliage.

Gooseberries are also greatly loved by the larvae of the gooseberry sawfly (Nematus ribesii), who are voracious little devils, and who are reputed to be able to strip a gooseberry bush of its foliage in a matter of days. Sawflies are not actually flies, but a member of the wasp, ant and bee family (Hymenoptera), and many adult sawflies are useful either as pollinators or as predators on other caterpillars in the garden. Sadly, this might be small comfort to someone whose gooseberry bush (not a euphemism) has been stripped by eager little sawfly larvae.

Now, if your gooseberries have survived, what do you do with them? The traditional uses are of course crumbles, jam, or a chutney-ish preserve to eat with cheese or the aforementioned mackerel (in French, gooseberries are groseille à maquereau or mackerel berries). I am spoilt for choice on recipes, but here is one for gooseberry, turmeric and frangipane tart that uses fresh turmeric (should you stumble across some), and here is a rather more accessible recipe for gooseberry crumble cake. And how about gooseberry and elderflower trifle? Very tasty.

And whoa, how about this for a poem! Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate of the UK, tells quite the story here. How many strange directions this takes! The commentary for the poet mentions that he is widely seen as the inheritor of Philip Larkin’s ‘Dark Wit’ . See what you think.

Gooseberry Season
Simon Armitage – 1963-

Which reminds me. He appeared
at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town
after losing his job, leaving me a note for his wife and his brother
and locking his dog in the coal bunker.
We made him a bed

and he slept till Monday.
A week went by and he hung up his coat.
Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,
a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.
One evening he mentioned a recipe

for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet
but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money
from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night
sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe
as we stirred his supper.

Where does the hand become the wrist?
Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
razor’s edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.

I could have told him this
but didn’t bother. We ran him a bath
and held him under, dried him off and dressed him
and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.
Then we drove without headlights

to the county boundary,
dropped the tailgate, and after my boy
had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress
across the meadow and on the count of four
threw him over the border.

This is not general knowledge, except
in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table
I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet
into five equal portions, for the hell of it.
I mention this for a good reason.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By User:Ridinghag – photo made by myself, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26741565

Photo Two by Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three by Ben Sale from UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four by Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Five by By I, Karon ind, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2287476