Dear Readers, this week I had a lesson in ‘seizing the day’. Last week I spotted a patch of pink sorrel in bloom in a front garden in Muswell Hill . I hadn’t seen it around here before, though it isn’t an uncommon plant.

‘Hah’, I thought, ‘I’ll pop back and take a photo of that when I get a second’.

Well, the days went past and when I revisited on Saturday not only were the flowers gone but the house owner was cheerfully pulling the plant up because ‘it gets everywhere’. Still, there were some leaves left and I find them very sweet, with their three sets of hearts joined in the middle. Those leaves are a sign that the plant is a member of the Oxalidaceae, or wood sorrels – we have already met one member of the family, procumbent yellow sorrel (Oxalis corniculata) and I hold out hope for my favourite plants, wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella).

Incidentally, although the plant is known as ‘pink shamrock’ in some places in the UK, it is not closely related to the ‘true’ shamrock, which is a variety of clover.

Pink sorrel comes originally from South America, and made its debut in the UK in a garden setting in 1870. By 1912 it was off and running. As it reproduces by a variety of methods, including seeds, runners and bulbils, it is often introduced to gardens in the compost surrounding other more desirable garden plants and vegetable seedlings. As the plant is acid-tolerant it can also thrive in areas where other flowers find it difficult to get a foot (root) hold. I can see that it could rapidly run amok, but when you see it in bloom it’s difficult to be deeply annoyed with it.

You might wonder why this delicate woodland species is called sorrel, when there is also a heftier plant that shares the name (Rumex acetosa). The reason is that the leaves of both have a lemony taste, and the word ‘sorrel’ comes from the Germanic word ‘sur’, meaning ‘sour’. One alternative name for sorrel is ‘sour grass’. Lots of people seem to eat the plant, in salads, as a stuffing, or, as here, as the basis for a refreshing drink. If you do eat it you could be doing yourself a favour: the leaves are also rich in Vitamin C, and one species, known as ‘scurvy-grass sorrel’ (Oxalis enneaphylla), was eaten by sailors in South America to prevent scurvy.

A  Bolivian species, Oxalis tuberosa has particularly tasty and swollen roots, known as ‘Oca’, and eaten in a manner similar to Jerusalem artichokes (though hopefully without the somewhat windy side effects).

Part of the reason for the ‘refreshing’ flavour of the leaves and flowers is the presence of oxalic acid, for which the genus is named. Lots of plants contain this compound, including spinach, rhubarb and broccoli, and, while it is toxic to humans you would need to eat a huge amount of the leaves in order to experience any ill effects. In fact, crystals of calcium oxalate used to be extracted from the plant for medicinal purposes, and also to produce a salt with a lemony flavour, known as ‘sorrel salt’.

Some species of Oxalis are apparently strongly attracted to copper in the soil, and a Ming Dynasty text from 1421 describes how dispersing the seed of the plant over a wide area would give an indication of where deposits of the mineral could be found.

According to the Doctrine of Signatures, plants in the Oxalis family are good for the heart because of the shape of those leaves.

And now, a poem. This one has a only passing mention of Oxalis, but I loved it so much that I wanted you to have a chance to read it too. The man to whom it is dedicated, Czeslaw Milosz (1911 to 2004), was a Polish poet who also saw himself as Lithuanian and a man instrumental in helping Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Poland  (for which he received the medal for ‘The Righteous Among the Nations’ in Yad Vashem, Israel). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 and wrote extensively against totalitarianism and prejudice. When he died, there was resistance to his being buried in Krakow Cathedral because of, among other things, his support for the rights of gays and lesbians. In other words, he was a man of conscience who used his writing and his life to support what he felt was right.

The poet Robert Hass is no slouch himself, having translated Milosz’s work, along with that of the Japanese haiku masters Basho and Issa. I love this poem for its breadth, and for the moments of stillness that it contains, much as after a haiku, there is a kind of opening, a silence.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By la la means I love you – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11197935

Photo Two by By Ivar Leidus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26560956

Photo Three by By Nzfauna – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19354058

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, I was in Somerset this week visiting my 91 year-old Aunt Hilary. Her garden really is a delight – at the moment it is absolutely full of cyclamen, but I have already waxed lyrical about them here, and here, so I have turned to the more subtle delights of this little fern. Maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes) is in the same genus as another common fern of these parts, hart’s tongue fern, but this plant is an altogether shyer character. It is easily identified by the delicate lozenge-shaped leaflets emerging from the jet black stems. Many ferns are known as spleenworts, because it was thought that the spores, which appear on the underside of the leaves, resembled the shape of the spleen. Under our old friend the Doctrine of Signatures, this was believed to mean that God was posting a message on the plant about how it could be used by humans.

Walls are a very special habitat, and only a few plants have learned the art of surviving on them. There is very little soil for the roots to anchor themselves in, nutrients are scarce, and, depending on whereabouts on the wall you germinate, it can be very dark or very exposed. Water too may be ever present (at the bottom of a shady wall) or very transient. All in all, wall-living plants have to be resilient and well-adapted.

Maidenhair spleenwort is happy growing in any kind of substrate (see below) and it also likes the damp, shadier conditions of a north-facing wall. The plant that I was admiring has a couple of relatives hiding close by. It all looks very Victorian somehow, the Victorians being great pteridophiles.

The spores of the plant are produced on the underside of special leaves called sporophylls (a normal leaf that produces sugars via photosynthesis is called a trophophyll). I love the spores of ferns, they have a kind of geometrical precision that delights me.

The story of the maidenhair spleenwort is rather more complicated than you might think, however. For a start, it is a true ‘citizen of the world’. It is native to every continent except Antarctica, and it has evolved to have a variety of different subspecies, each with a different ‘lifestyle’. One subspecies, Asplenium trichomanes trichomanes prefers acidic rocks such as basalt and sandstone, and is found mainly in mountainous northern areas in Europe and North America. Another, Asplenium trichomanes quadrivalens, prefers alkaline rocks such as limestone and will grow in mortar, so I suspect that this is ‘our’ plant. It is much commoner in Europe than in North America. Majorca, Madeira and the Azores also have their own subspecies of the plant. Furthermore, where the subspecies intermingle they can also hybridise. I suspect that botanists who specialise in ferns will have plenty of work sorting that lot out for generations to come.

It just goes to show that some supposedly ‘primitive’ and simple plants have staggeringly complicated backstories, just as it’s often the quietest and most self-effacing people who have lived the most extraordinary lives.

The Plant Lives website describes how, in North America, maidenhair spleenwort was used by the Native American Hopi tribe as part of their rain-making rituals – the plant was soaked in water, and the water was then painted onto prayersticks. For the Cherokee people, the plant had many medicinal uses, including for liver and uterine problems, and was also used to make cough mixture. In County Cavan in Ireland, the plant was boiled with honey and oatmeal as a cure for dysentery.

In Slavic folklore, it was believed that anyone who found a ‘fern flower’ would be happy and rich for the rest of their lives. The fern was believed to flower only once a year, on Midsummer’s Eve. As ferns are not flowering plants I fear that the search for a bloom would have been in vain although maybe the hunt provided an opportunity for young people to go off into the woods on their own on this magical shortest night of the year.

Now, as you know, this blog takes me to some fascinating and unlikely places. This week, it’s taken me to the paintings of Gerard David (1460 to 1523), a Netherlandish painter who was renowned for his use of colour. However, he was also a painter of extraordinarily detailed plants, which often seem to pop up everywhere amidst his portraits of religious figures. One of his paintings, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, features two ferns including Maidenhair Spleenwort growing out of the wall behind Mary and Joseph.

I am indebted to Caleb Leech, the Managing Horticulturalist at the Met Cloisters, for pointing this out, and for his explanation of the inclusion of these humble plants in the work:

‘While the setting of the painting could simply depict the common state of stone buildings during the Middle Ages, I believe it also demonstrates a love for the bucolic, ramshackle idyll of nature. This same sentiment is witnessed in the modern Gothic folly (an ornamental building with no practical use), or in a recreated medieval ruin set amidst a garden. Then, perhaps even more than now, weedy or opportunistic species like ferns and dandelions were much appreciated. The artist’s careful attention to the ferns softened the setting and emphasized how much the medieval world was fundamentally connected with plants.

And here is the entire triptych:

And finally, a poem. As you might expect, the canon is not exactly snowed under with poems that specifically mention the maidenhair spleenwort, but my search for the mention of ferns in general has brought me to Theodore Roethke, an American poet who had his problems with mental health and alcoholism but who wrote some of my very favourite poems. Here is an excerpt from his 1948 poem ‘A Field of Light’. It seems to me to conjure that ecstatic feeling that I sometimes get when I’m walking in nature, alone, on a late spring morning. See what you think.

A Field of Light by Theodore Roethke
The dirt left my hand, visitor.
I could feel the mare’s nose.
A path went walking.
The sun glittered on a small rapids.
Some morning thing came, beating its wings.
The great elm filled with bird.

Listen, love,
The fat lark sand in the field;
I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,
The salt laughed and the stones;
The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,
And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives.
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Bjorn S at https://www.flickr.com/photos/40948266@N04/40523421534/

Photo Two from https://metmuseum.org/blogs/in-season/2015/cryptogams

Dear Readers, I was delighted to spot a witch hazel in flower in Borough Gardens in Dorchester last week. I have always been fascinated by those strange, strap-like, dishevelled petals, and the way that they stand out when everything else is still in bud. The plant itself is a member of the Hamamelidaceae family, which is now confined to eastern North America and Central America, eastern Africa and Madagascar, and the Far East, though it was much wider spread before the Ice Ages in the northern hemisphere. ‘Our’ witch hazel comes originally from China, and was collected from there by the plant hunter Charles Maries. There was (and still is) a lot of money in plants, and the Victorians in particular had a craze for species from China and Japan to complement their ‘oriental’ schemes, and to add novelty. Although not an especially showy plant, witch hazel became popular because of its winter colour and unusual flowers.

Witch hazel is not a hazel, as we have seen, but neither is it particularly linked to witches, with the ‘witch’ in the name thought to come from the Middle English word ‘wych’, meaning ‘bendable’  or ‘pliable’. In the US, where there are several native species of witch hazel, the plant is used for dowsing (the detection of underground water, minerals or other buried objects), while in the UK hazel is used. Although this practice is described as a pseudoscience, with no clear proof of its efficiency, I find it interesting that 10 of the 12 water companies in the UK still use it to find leaks, along with other methods.

Because of its winter-flowering, witch hazel is wind-pollinated (most self-respecting insects are tucked up in hibernation or pupation at this time of year). When the seedheads are ripe they explode, sending the seeds flying through the air. They can travel up to 30 feet, which is enough distance to give them a chance of germinating without being overshadowed by the parent plant, and explains the alternative name of ‘snapping hazel’.

The flowers have a most attractive scent, which is another reason for its popularity with the cognoscenti. It is also extremely frost-resistant. However, it is slow-growing, which may explain its relative expensiveness here in the UK if compared to plants like the ubiquitous forsythia. You need to be patient if you buy a small witch hazel, and rich if you want to buy a more mature one.

 

Witch hazel is a regular ingredient in many medicinal and cosmetic products: witch hazel water is made by boiling up the leaves, bark and roots and then distilling the result. There is a lot of tannin in witch hazel, which is why it is often used as an astringent, for drying up acne, or dissuading piles. The North American species have been used extensively by native peoples, for everything from sore throats to haemorrhage. However, it should be noted that using the bark directly can cause skin disfigurement, so best to get stuck into that distilling process. Witch hazel ointment sometimes also contains arnica, and is used for minor injuries and bruising.

It is said that those explosive seeds are edible (if you can find them before they’re catapulted into the stratosphere), and the twigs can be used as a replacement toothbrush if you find yourself in need of emergency oral hygiene.

It doesn’t surprise me that witch hazel attracted the attention of Charles Rennie Mackintosh better known as an architect and furniture designer. I love the print below, with its simple elegance. The style is said to be more indicative of Mackintosh’s wife, Margaret MacDonald, who was an art student at Glasgow School of Art when the two met. At the time that it was painted (1915), the pair were living in the village of Walberswick in Suffolk, where Mackintosh was accused of being a German spy and briefly arrested. This may have been the impetus for a later move to Port- Vendres in Southern France in 1923, a warmer, sunnier and cheaper place to live.

And to complete the post this week, here is a poem by Robert Frost. I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship to this poet’s work: there is a kind of down-home folksiness to it that I just don’t get (and I was once accused of not realising that the poet was trying to be funny, which was extremely embarrassing at the time). I have something of a problem also with his double-syllable rhyming scheme, which skitters along on the edge of doggerel, to my ear at least. And yet, I rather like this poem, all in all. He is talking about the American witch hazel, which flowers in the autumn, rather than the one that I saw. Indeed, if he had seen the Chinese witch hazel blossoming in mid winter he might have had to write a completely different poem.

 

Dear Readers, this rather elegant but spindly plant is a member of the Aloe family, and has a bit of a history. The mother plant belonged to a good friend of my husband’s who died back in 1998, and this is a tiny offshoot from that original aloe. You might expect it to be a bit larger considering that that was over 20 years ago, but it has had an adventurous time of it. A few years ago I put it out in the garden so that it could have a summer holiday, but for some reason the local foxes took exception to it, and dragged it out of its pot and under the hedge. If my husband hadn’t noticed that it was missing, it would probably have died there, but as it was we were able to rescue it and repot it. I hoped that it would  survive, and indeed it has, though I suspect it is still not as happy as it could be. It reminds me rather of one of Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures.

There are many, many species of Aloe, but knowing my husband’s friend, I think this plant is most likely to be Aloe vera, because he was very interested in the healing properties of plants. This plant originates in the Arabian peninsula, but has become naturalised in many parts of the world – indeed, I saw one on the island of Lanzarote that was easily the size of a small garden shed. Like all aloes, Aloe vera is a succulent that is adapted for desert climates, and stores water in its leaves. The sharp spines along the edge of leaf are a protection against the grazing animals that would otherwise gobble it up in order to supplement their own liquid reserves.

The water is held by the plant in the form of a gel, which is claimed to have all kinds of soothing and healing properties, particularly in cases of skin irritation or burns. The gel is also used as a dietary supplement and as a thickener for products such as yoghurt.

Unprocessed aloe vera ‘juice’ contains a substance called aloin which can work as a laxative, although products marketed for this purpose were banned in the US in 2002 due to their potential toxicity.  It has also been used as a cold and flu remedy, and to treat herpes. In fact, the ancient Egyptians knew it as ‘the plant of immortality’ and used it for more or less any ailment.

Although sometimes considered effective against the side effects of radiotherapy treatment, Cancer Research UK has reviewed the evidence and remains unconvinced.

It is true, however, that Aloe vera has a history of medicinal use going back to the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, a list of plants used in ancient Egypt from 1550 BC. I can see how temptingly emollient that sap looks, and am not surprised that among the products that I looked up at random are moisturisers, toilet tissue and, ahem, a colon cleanse.

For a long time it was believed that Aloe vera grew only on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, and Aristotle was said to have asked Alexander the Great to conquer the island to make sure that supplies of the plant could be maintained. Alexander is said to have ethnically cleansed the island of its original inhabitants, replacing them with Ionians who would tend the aloes. The island is also home to myrrh (a tree resin extracted from the bark of a number of small trees), which, with Aloe vera, was used as an embalming fluid.

Although my Aloe vera plant is a bit weedy at the moment, they are rather splendid when they get to flowering size.

Although through some of their naturalised range Aloe vera plants might be pollinated by insects, they evolved to be pollinated by sunbirds, in particular the Arabian sunbird (Cinnyris habessinicus hellmayri). These fill the niche that is occupied by hummingbirds in the New World, and look surprisingly similar. The plant can also reproduce by offshoots, like the one that produced my husband’s plant.

And finally, a poem by Danielle Chapman, another poet who is new to me (and how I love the journeys that I go on when I research this blog)! She is based in Connecticut, but this poem speaks to me of somewhere else. I think she catches the way that curiosity, and close attention, is so often a cure for both major, and minor, pains. I have certainly found it to be so over this past few years.

 

Photo Credits

Photo One by hh oldman [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

Photo Two by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127320

Photo Three by By Collage by en:User:MidgleyDJ, original images from Wikimedia commons (Image:Aloe_vera_offsets.jpg and Image:Aloe_vera_C.jpg) – See author., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5084561

Photo Four by Av Tore – https://www.flickr.com/photos/28092414@N03/16153474921, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58326388

Photo Five by By Rahulsharma photography – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49803138

Dear Readers, please excuse the somewhat bruised example of Lisianthus above – it was in one of the table decorations from my Mum’s Memorial service on Saturday, and has travelled back to East Finchley from Dorset via a rail  replacement bus,  so it is looking a little sad. I will write more about the service on Saturday, but it went as well as these things ever do, and better than most, so I have much to be thankful and grateful for. Mum was always partial to these delicate flowers, in their varied shades of pink and lilac, blue and white, and I realised that I knew next to nothing about them, except that they were very popular with florists, and, when not carted from one end of the country to the other, were very long-lasting and resilient.

So, it turns out that lisianthus is also known as prairie gentian or Texas bluebell, and comes originally from the southern US, Central America and northern South America. As its common name suggests, it’s a member of the gentian family, and the wild plant lives in grassland and disturbed habitats.It is now relatively rare, particularly in the US where plant hunters sometimes cut the flowers before they seed. A field full of the wild plants must be really something to behold, and there are some stunning photos on the Wildflower Haven website here.

There is some confusion about how it got the English name lisianthus, which in Latin refers to a completely different plant. The name lisianthus comes from the Greek words for ‘smooth flower’, whereas the Latin name of the plant, Eustoma, means ‘good mouth’ in Greek.

I have always been very fond of the way the buds of lisianthus twirl open, like a tutu. The flowers seem to have the strong, supple grace of a ballerina.

Lisianthus is sometimes known as ‘poor man’s rose’, and I can see the similarity, though deep blue and purple ‘Lizzies’ have achieved a colour that roses can only aspire to. Lizzies aren’t fragrant, but then neither are most shop-bought roses. What does interest me is that lisianthus seems to have become a florist’s favourite from nowhere – I certainly don’t remember it when I was growing up, though Japanese horticulturalists have been creating different varieties since the 1930’s. The blue lisianthus is particularly revered in Japan, and is often placed on the grave of loved ones.

For anyone inclined to rush out and get a packet of lisianthus seeds though, I would say be careful. According to ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ magazine, they are very slow to grow, taking 15 to 20 months from planting to flowering. The seed is dust like and must be lain on top of the soil, rather than buried. The soil must be rich and friable, and while the plant needs to be watered, too much will cause it to fall prey to a whole variety of fungal diseases and pests. Once up, it will need to be staked, to prevent it falling over and those delicate blooms being damaged. Finally, this plant is technically an annual, so once it’s flowered you’ll have to do it all over again. If you’ve had any success with lisianthus, do let me know, so that we can find out how you did it and give you a round of applause.

Lisianthus is apparently the birth flower for people born under Sagittarius (November 22nd to December 21st), which would have delighted Mum as she was born on November 26th.

And here is our poem, by none other than Emily Dickinson. It refers to a close relative of ‘our’ lisianthus, but is none the less charming for that.

‘Fringed Gentian’ by Emily Dickinson

God made a little gentian;

It tried to be a rose

And failed, and all the summer laughed.

But just before the snows

There came a purple creature

That ravished all the hill;

And summer hid her forehead,

And mockery was still.

The frosts were her condition;

The Tyrian would not come

Until the North evoked it.

“Creator! shall I bloom?”

Photo Credits

Photo One by CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=432031

Photo Two by By Photo by David J. Stang – source: David Stang. First published at ZipcodeZoo.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61022222

Photo Three by Ramesh Ng https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubor:Lisianthus_aka_Eustoma_7214.JPG

Photo Four by Downtowngal [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Photo Five from https://www.nps.gov/whsa/learn/nature/desert-in-bloom.htm