Dear Readers, it’s funny how fashions in gardening change. When I was young, stiff, regimented armies of geraniums and alyssum and blue lobelia were the way to go, with the occasional radical individual throwing in a few French marigolds for good measure. But just lately the trend has been towards much more informal beds, featuring feathery grasses as a backdrop, interspersed with more delicate-looking perennials. So I was not surprised when I looked around the new houses that have been built off Grand Avenue in Muswell Hill and found these butterfly-like Gaura dancing in the breeze.

We have one gardener to thank for this move towards ‘prairie-style’ planting, and that’s Piet Oudolf. He designed the  planting the Olympic Park in Stratford, the High Line in New York and the meadows at the Hauser and Wirth gallery in Somerset among many, many others. I have been hugely influenced by him too, although this relaxed look is in some ways even more difficult to create and maintain than a Tudor knot garden. I love how they look, though, and that they have such value, when done right, for birds and invertebrates.

Oudolf created his own strain of Gaura, ‘Whirling Butterflies’, to complement his garden style. Thank you very much, sir! I am fairly sure that this is the variety in my photographs.

Actually, although it looks as if a puff of wind would blow it over, Gaura is one tough plant. It doesn’t mind being exposed. It doesn’t mind heat. It doesn’t mind drought.  I suspect that it doesn’t much like heavy soil, as the ones that I planted in my garden expired almost instantly. It is said to be deer-resistant, which is not much of an advantage in East Finchley where the only deer is the plaster one on top of the Bald-Faced Stag pub.  But the plant does, apparently, relish being given a hair cut regularly, and its floppiness can be offset by planting it amongst more upright plants which will support it, such as the Verbena bonariensis in the photo above.

Actually, Gaura is no longer the official name for this plant: its new Latin name is Oenothera lindheimeri which reflects that it is part of the evening primrose family, though it looks nothing like a classic evening primrose.  I shall keep the name Gaura for this piece, as this is how most people know the plant. It has a variety of vernacular names, including Lindheimer’s beeblossom and Indian feather in its native Louisiana and Texas.

This is a plant that flowers prolifically when it’s happy, from early spring right through to the first frosts. Each  stem produces many white or pink flowers, and in some varieties the petals start off white at dawn and turn pink during the day, before falling off at dusk.

And here is one of the pink varieties, ‘Siskiyou Pink’. Note that it’s being pollinated by a fly – most members of the evening primrose family are insect pollinated, and some have very specific relationships with particular types of invertebrates, such as moths.

The original name ‘Gaura lindheimeri‘ comes from Gaura, the Greek for ‘superb’, and from the name of the German botanist Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer (1801 – 1879), who collected plants in Texas for Asa Gray, the Harvard professor of botany for several decades. Lindheimer collected over 1500 species in the south Texas area in thirteen years, and is known as the Father of Texas Botany, with over twenty species bearing his name.

Incidentally, in Icelandic the word ‘gaur‘ means a gangly, unruly boy. Completely coincidental, I’m sure.

Gaura was used medicinally in several ways by the native peoples of the US – the Hopi used a decoction of the roots to treat snakebite, and the Navajo used it as a burn dressing and to treat inflammation. A close relative of ‘our’ Gaura, Gaura coccinea, is said to be good for erasing freckles, though why anyone would want to rid themselves of these delightful little speckles is beyond me. Blank perfection is extremely overrated in my view. It’s sometimes as if we want to photoshop ourselves into non-existence.

And here is a poem. Written by Anca Vlasopolos, who was born in Romania and who has lived in Detroit for many years, it conjures up the feeling of panic I sometimes get on those strange days when the weather is unseasonal, and the animals are confused, and vulnerable. Vlasopolos is a passionate environmentalist, poet, ceramicist and teacher. I shall be reading more of her work, for sure.

Tardy Bugs

this october warm haze cheats
us into hallucinating summer
roses pump up sparse buds with a fury that would
give cabbage blooms if this weather went on
bumblebees nap on gaura flowers bending swaying
on filaments

the afternoon blushes
an efflorescence
inexplicable numbers fill the air
settle on brick on white door as if on sandy beaches
                                              in the Bahamas
eyeing rapacious eyes staring from leaves of the crabapple
that now is animate with screams and jostlings
i urge these absurd polka-dot balls underground
you don’t know what’s coming and if you all get caught
by a frost, get picked out by beaks like coins thrown among
crowds what’ll happen in spring when the ants will shepherd
their aphid flocks up the tenderest shoots i say as i brush them
away from the crack of the door
they bursting orange then gathering themselves into
compact hemispheres soaking soaking the last of the sun

Photo Credits

Photo One from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/30/piet-oudolf-gardens-hampton-court-palace-flower-show#img-1 photo by Jason Ingram

Photo Two by By JJ Harrison (jjharrison89@facebook.com) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6362117

Photo Two by Wendy Cutler from Vancouver, Canada [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, I have searched long and hard for this plant in East Finchley, only to find it in abundance when I did my Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park walk a few weeks ago. It is our only native clematis, and has a variety of vernacular names. The sixteenth-century writer and herbalist John Gerard christened it ‘traveller’s-joy’ :

‘These plants have no use in physick as yet found out, but are esteemed only for pleasure, by reason of the  goodly shadow which they make with their thick bushing and climbing, as also for the beauty of the flowers, and the pleasant scent or savour of the same’.

The fluffy ‘hair-do’ seedheads are indeed a delight, and the flowers, though small, can be extremely abundant. I’ve never savoured the scent, but they are said to smell faintly of almond.

The plant is a member of the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae) and is found in the UK roughly south of a line from the Mersey to the Humber. It has been widely planted in other places, however, and is considered invasive in countries such as New Zealand. Left to its own devices, it can form a thick canopy that shades out other plants. However, in the UK it is the sole foodplant of several species of moths, including the small emerald, small waved umber and Haworth’s pug, who help to keep it under control.

The dry winter stems of old man’s beard have been used as cigarette substitutes, giving old names such as ‘smokewood’ and ‘boy’s bacca’.  In Slovenia the stems were was used to tie sheaves of grain together, because it was believed that mice wouldn’t gnaw on them. The stems have also been used to make baskets and rope since the Stone Age.

In Italy, the boiled buds are used in omelettes called ‘Fritatta di vitalbini’ and are considered a delicacy.

In spite of Gerard’s belief that the plant was not used for ‘physick’, a juice made from old man’s beard was used in the nostrils to cure migraine. I find the warning that ‘it can also destroy the mucous membranes’ a little alarming, however, and the Poison Garden website describes it as follows:

‘Ingestion leads to severe abdominal pain, gastrointestinal irritation and has caused death in cattle though it is not usually eaten because it has an acrid taste and contact can cause skin irritation‘.

In short, old man’s beard is a plant to be used well-boiled, or not at all.

The Bittersweet Gourmet website describes how

‘ medieval beggars and mendicant friars would enlist vitalba’s venomous qualities to bring about sores on the skin, to achieve a more pitiable appearance before those potentially charitable souls whom they passed on the road‘.

In French, the plant is known as ‘herbe aux geaux‘, or rascal’s herb, so presumably this effect was well known across the plant’s range.

From a folkloric point of view, old man’s beard bears a double meaning, as is so often the way. It was said by countryfolk to do the devil’s work, because it smothered other plants and killed them. It is also associated with the Virgin Mary and with God because of its white flowers, and another vernacular name for the plant is ‘Virgin’s bower’. I can well imagine resting on a bed of these fluffy white seedheads, or reclining among the sweet-scented flowers.

I have been quite remiss on the poetry front for this past few weeks, but here’s a piece by Edward Thomas to make up for it. He really is one of the best of England’s poets with regard to his appreciation of the countryside. ‘A mouthful of earth to remedy all’, indeed.

 

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Hectonichus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15699562

Photo Two by By ©entomartIn case of publication or commercial use, Entomart wishes then to be warned (http://www.entomart.be/contact.html), but this without obligation. Thank you., Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=293985

Photo Three by By ©entomartIn case of publication or commercial use, Entomart wishes then to be warned (http://www.entomart.be/contact.html), but this without obligation. Thank you., Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=823634

Photo Four by By Donald Hobern from Canberra, Australia – Eupithecia haworthiata, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5000120

Photo Five from http://ricettetoscane.altervista.org/frittata-di-vitalbini.html

Dear Readers, I am always delighted to come across a weed that I’ve never seen before, and even more delighted when it’s in the company of a friend who actually knows what it was. Thus it was that I found this beauty lurking on Bedford Road in East Finchley. On first glance at the flowers, I thought that it was a species geranium such as ‘Rosanne’, but the leaves looked more like those of a potato or tomato. My friend knew what it was because she had planted some in her garden and, plants being what they are, this one had jumped over the fence and spread down the road.

Known as the Shoofly plant, because of the belief that it will keep all kinds of flying insects away, this plant is also known as Apple of Peru. It is thought to have come from Peru originally, but these days has set up home across the globe – it is a popular ingredient in wild bird food, and so it can pop up more or less anywhere. It favours tropical and sub-tropical climates but, as this one shows, it can be equally happy in a damp North London street. In the Caribbean it is planted around windows and doors to deter biting flies. It grows into a hefty annual, with the lilac-blue flowers being replaced by attractive seed-capsules.

The fruits are interesting – they resemble Cape gooseberry, or physalis, but actually shoofly plant is a member of the nightshade family, and the fruits, and indeed the whole plant, are generally thought to be toxic. In Australia there has been at least one recorded case of sheep dying as a result of feasting on shoofly plant, and in many countries the plant is used as an insecticide. In Tanzania a decoction of the plant has been used to treat headlice, in the southern states of the USA it has been mixed into milk as a poisonous bait for house flies and blow flies, and it has also been used as a treatment for worms and to kill the amoeba that causes dysentery. These insecticidal properties come from a group of chemicals known as nicandrenones, which were finally synthesised for commercial use in 2000.

This has not stopped people also eating  the leaves as a pot herb, and using the seeds and leaves medicinally for everything from fever and indigestion to constipation. The plant is naturalised in many countries, and has been taken into medicine cabinets everywhere from the Himalayas to Brazil and Madagascar.

Shoofly plant, like other members of the nightshade family, is also said to be mildly psychoactive and to cause dilation of the pupil ( which is known as mydriasis – a new word!) As you might remember, deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna) was once used in eyedrops by high-ranking Italian women to produce just this effect -it was thought that those big, dark eyes were particularly sexually attractive.  Shoofly plant has also been used to produce this effect, with little regard for the fact that prolonged use can produce blindness.

Shoofly plant is the only species in its genus, Nicandra. Nicandra is thought to have come from the Greek poet Nicander of Colophon, who lived in the 2nd Century BCE and who wrote two surviving poems: one, Theriaca, is about venomous animals and their poisons, and the other, Alexipharmaca, is about other toxins, including those of plants. He was praised by such luminaries as Cicero, and was quoted by Pliny and other writers. Here is an illustration from the Theriaca, featuring a youth who is strolling through the countryside and considering whether to whack something with his hockey stick. I note that in a study of the Theriaca, F. Overduin describes the author as having a

‘predilection for horror, voyeuristic sensationalism, and gory details’

If only I could find a translation.

Now, try as I might I can find any poetry that refers to the shoofly plant, under this name or any of its other names. However, I have found the rather delightful shoofly pie, which fortunately contains neither Nicandra physalodes or dead insects, but instead contains molasses. It originated in the 1880’s in the Pennsylvania Dutch community, who called it Melassich Riwwelboi or Melassichriwwelkuche (Molasses Crumb Cake) and ate it with strong black coffee for breakfast. It contains no eggs, which leads historians to believe that it was baked in the winter when the hens weren’t laying, but when molasses would be available, and the pie crust meant that it was easier to eat ‘on the run’. I can only imagine that the name arose because of the resemblance between the black molasses and a swarm of flies. It seems that the bakers of 1880’s Pennsylvania had a sense of humour that Nicander of Colophon may well have appreciated!

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Anonymous – http://campus.belmont.edu/honors/macedonian/manus.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8916784

Photo Two by By Syounan Taji – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31206973

Dear Readers, the monkey puzzle tree is a true ‘living fossil’, and it is believed that the long necks of some dinosaurs may have evolved to reach up into these trees. There was originally a global distribution of these plants, and today they are found in South America (the monkey puzzle species comes from the Andes and is the Chilean National Plant), New Caledonia, Australia and New Guinea, implying that they existed when there were no separate continents, just the massive landmass of Gondwana land. Since then they have become rare due to deforestation and climate change, and some of the most magnificent specimens can be found in the estates and stately homes of the UK, where they have been grown since the 1850’s. As the tree can live for up to a thousand years there are many that will be around for a good while yet.

The tree in the photo grows in Fortis Green, an area between Muswell Hill and East Finchley. I love the way that it is snuggled around the house, and I wonder if the owners know that it can grow (eventually) to a 130 feet tall? The scaly, almost reptilian leaves can live for up to 24 years and eventually cover the entire stem. This one is also full of cones at the moment. Most trees either bear male or female cones, but the occasional tree will have both, or will change from one sex to another. This tree is a female, with the typical round cones that can hold up to 200 seeds. The male cones dangle and provide the pollen – the plant is wind-pollinated.

Those seeds are highly edible, and were an important food source for several indigenous tribes in South America, especially the Araucanians for whom the species is named. Because the cones drop to the ground, the seeds are easily harvested, although the tree doesn’t produce them until it is 30-40 years old.The seeds are known as piñones, and are used in many recipes: you can find piñones soup and croquets here, along with an interesting piece on the relationship between the Mapuche people and the monkey puzzle here.

If not eaten by people, the seeds are carried away by the long-haired grass mouse (Akodon longipilis) and buried – as is often the case, the mouse doesn’t remember where every cache is hidden, and so new trees soon grow up. Rodents and birds are often creators of forests.

The town of Whitby in Yorkshire was, from Roman times, a source of jet, much used in jewellery. Whitby jet dates back to Jurassic times (approximately 182 million years ago), and is the fossilised remains of a species very similar to the monkey puzzle tree. The material was probably collected from the beach at Whitby and transferred to York to be made into objects such as the jet cameo below. The Romans believed that the material had magical properties: Pliny the Elder suggest that:

“the kindling of jet drives off snakes and relieves suffocation of the uterus. Its fumes detect attempts to simulate a disabling illness or a state of virginity.”

For the Victorians it was a popular choice for mourning jewellery, with Queen Victoria wearing it after the death of Prince Albert.

Incidentally, ‘jet-black’ used to mean the blackest black possible, until modern technology came along and produced ‘Vantablack’, a pigment that absorbs 99.6% of all the light that falls on it, and which was promptly snapped up by the artist Anish Kapoor, who owns exclusive rights to the material. This caused absolute uproar in the artistic community – who wouldn’t want to use a pigment that has been described as ‘the blackest material in the universe, after a black hole’?

But as usual I digress.

For a non-native tree, the monkey puzzle has attracted a considerable amount of folklore, much of it conflicting. In the UK, children were told to be quiet on passing the tree if they didn’t want to grow a monkey’s tail (and of course some children took to yelling in order to acquire such an appendage). Another superstition was that the devil sat in the tree, and you need to sneak past to avoid attracting his attention. On the other hand, a Cambridgeshire belief has it that monkey puzzles were planted on the edge of graveyards because they  were difficult for the devil to climb, and so he couldn’t gain a vantage point from which to watch burials.

And now to another Araucaria. This was the pen name of the Reverend John Graham who compiled The Guardian cryptic crossword for more than 50 years, and very convoluted it was too. I personally find the quick crossword is about my limit (and Graham also compiled this for many years), but I know lots of people who enjoy the challenge of the wordplay of the cryptic variety.

Graham was an idiosyncratic but much-loved crossword setter, and loved a themed crossword – his choices had varied from crosswords on the theme of anti-apartheid heroes to Dickens novels.  When he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in December 2012, he set his whole crossword around the theme: when solved, it revealed that Araucaria had cancer of the oesophagus, which was treated with palliative care.

It seems to me that we underrate the pleasure derived from a good puzzle. Trying to solve the Quick Crossword in the Guardian has provided me with twenty minutes away from my trials and tribulations for more than twenty years. Bravo Reverend John Graham, for bringing so much happiness and head-scratching to crossword enthusiasts for half a century.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33388678

Photo Two by By Photographed by: York Museums Trust Staff – This file originated on the York Museums Trust Online Collection. YMT hosted a GLAMwiki partnership in 2013/14.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38964856

Photo Three from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/26/anish-kapoor-vantablack-art-architecture-exclusive-rights-to-the-blackest-black

Dear Readers, for the longest time I wondered why people planted staghorn sumac – it’s a small elegant tree, to be sure, but for most of the year the only interest are those fuzzy fruits. But come autumn, they take on some of the most brilliant autumn colour that you can see around the County Roads in East Finchley, and all becomes clear. These trees are the belles of the ball when October comes around and on a cold, blustery, rainy day like today they stand out like traffic lights.

Although all the photos today come from ‘domesticated’ sumacs, you don’t have to look far to see them growing ‘in the wild’. There is a fine stand of them along the railway embankment on the way into Waterloo for example, and they often pop up on wasteground. In ‘Alien Plants’, Clive Stace describes it as ‘a favourite plant that all too soon becomes oppressive, at which point it gets thrown over the garden fence’. He believes that its location alongside railways is probably because these can be difficult spots to eradicate, though the vigorous use of weed killer as I zoom through Wimbledon and Clapham Junction makes me think that Transport for London has redoubled its efforts just lately. For the third week in succession I am featuring a plant that is on the RHS’s list of ‘thugs’ – staghorn sumac largely spreads from a rhizome, but can throw up suckers a fair way from the parent plant, and go grow into dense thickets, crowding out other plants.

Sumacs are native to the eastern side of North America – I saw them growing wild in Collingwood, Ontario for example. The name’ staghorn sumac’ refers to the hairy stems and and the forking branches of the tree, which resemble a stag’s antlers. They are members of the cashew nut family, of all things, the Anacardiaceae, which also includes mangoes and the marula tree. Marula is  an African fruit which is much loved by elephants, but which makes them drunk if the fruit has begun to  ferment. I remember a rather lovely cream liqueur called Amarula which was all the rage when I was a student and knew no better.

In North America, the leaves and berries of the tree were dried and smoked, on their own or mixed with tobacco. The stems could also be used as pipes, making the plant a handy source of all things smoking-related. The grain of the wood is exquisite.

The strange velvety fruits can be used to make pink lemonade, known as ‘sumac-ade’ and considered both refreshing and health-giving – for a recipe, have a look here.Sumac is a spice much used in North Africa and the Middle East, but this comes from a closely related shrub, Rhus coriaria.

All parts of the plant can be used to make a dye for cloth, and it is rich in natural tannins – this may have led to the plant’s French and German common name, the vinegar tree. You can read a bit more about using staghorn sumac as a dye in the last part of Jenny Dean’s blog here. On the Plant Lives website, Sue Eland records that

Staghorn sumac is a powerful antioxidant, and the fruits were used by Native Americans for everything from treating sore throats to helping to alleviate diarrhoea. It was a veritable medicine chest, with different tribes using it for different purposes. It was believed to cure venereal disease and tuberculosis, to aid childbirth, to treat stomach upsets and as a general tonic.

Some North American tribes believed that staghorn sumac could foretell the weather, although try as I might I cannot work out how. On the Plant Lore website, gardeners in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire seem to believe that planting staghorn sumac in a garden will bring marital strife (though in no other region is this a belief). This is a change from the usual litany of disasters that will occur when a plant is brought into the house, but still. It’s a wonder that anyone plants anything, such are the predictions of disaster for almost everything that you might want to grow.

And here, for our poem and to celebrate the season, is a deceptively simple poem by William Wilfred Campbell (1861 – 1918), a Canadian poet who had no doubt seen plenty of staghorn sumacs in his day. I say ‘deceptively simple’ because each line of this poem conjures up an  photographic image of a Canadian autumn in the mind’s eye, and because of the air of wistfulness that flavours it. You may think you could knock this up in an hour, but I suspect it ain’t so easy. Anyhoo, see what you think!

Indian Summer