Dear Readers, this seems to have been a particularly good year for columbines.They are the quintessential cottage garden plant, but I was surprised to discover that the small flowered blue form, as seen above, is a native. Because various forms of columbine are grown so frequently in the garden it’s hard to determine what the actual range of the plant is, but Aquilegia, a genus of about 70 species, are found throughout the northern hemisphere. Aquilegia vulgaris seems to like calcium-rich soils, woodland areas and damp grassland, and is most common in the south and west of the UK – I found the flowers in the photos today in Somerset and Dorset.

Columbine has many, many local names. Most refer to the shape of the flowers: my Vickery’s Folk Flora tells me that the plant is known as ‘Doves-in-the-ark’ in Somerset; the name ‘Columbine’ comes from the Latin word for dove, ‘columba‘, with the inverted flower being said to resemble five doves clustered together. In Yorkshire it’s called ‘Fool’s hat’, a reference to flower’s resemblance to a jester’s cap. In Wiltshire it bears the name of ‘Granny-jump-out-of-bed’, possible because the petals resemble a skirt, though why granny was wearing her clothes in bed would probably make a story all on its own. ‘Aquilegia’ means ‘eagle-like’, and this is because the petals are supposed to look like an eagle’s claw.

The wild form of columbine is usually dark blue, though it can also be found in pale pink and white. However, the ‘domesticated’ forms come in a huge variety of colours and flower shapes. Here are a selection: first, the cultivar ‘Magpie’

Then this rather pretty blue cultivar

And this pink one….

And a double-flowered one for good measure.

What is interesting about the structure of the columbine, however, is that it is the spurs at the back of the flower hold the nectar. The length of these structures varies from species to species, but in all wild plants the spurs have evolved to match the bird or insect that pollinates it. In California, Aquilegia pubescens (also known as the Sierra columbine) is a high-altitude plant that has white flowers, and spurs up to 5 centimetres long. The plant is pollinated by hawk moths, insects with a liking for white-flowered plants and with a tongue long enough to reach the nectar.

At lower altitudes, from Alaska to Baja California is the crimson columbine (Aquilegia formosa). Its red colour and much shorter spurs are a giveaway that its main pollinators are hummingbirds (most red-flowered wild plants were originally bird-pollinated). In between there are a whole host of hybrids between the two species, illustrating the way that the plant is adapting to the chief pollinators in each area. The process illustrates the way that plants and pollinators are locked into a dance of evolution, with each dependent on the other.

For anyone who would like a closer look at the structure of the columbine flower, I recommend the UK Microscopy website, which has many fascinating insights. One of these days I shall treat myself to a microscope, maybe for my fast-approaching sixtieth birthday – I love the way that a close-up view reveals so many wonders. But in the meantime I shall keep going to UK Microscopy for my high-magnification fix.

In the UK, columbine is a good bee plant, and is a nice choice for a woodland garden. It attracts mainly long-tongued bumblebees, and as seven of these species are considered endangered, it is well worth popping a few columbines into your understorey (should you have one). The bumblebee with the longest tongue in the UK is the garden bumblebee (Bombus hortorum), who has a tongue which can reach 2 cms long and is hence a match for any native columbine. My advice is to avoid the highly-bred fancy cultivars, and go for the dark blue natives.  Plus, you don’t have to worry about isolating individual cultivars or even species in order to get them to ‘come true’ – as we have seen, columbines hybridize at the drop of a hat.

There seems to be some debate over whether Aquilegia vulgaris (‘our’ columbine) is poisonous – they are members of the Ranunculaceae or buttercup family, and are closely related to monkshood (Aconitum napellus), described as ‘the most toxic wild plant in Britain’. Some sites described the roots and stems as being toxic, and on the Poison Garden website, the dark columbine (Aquilegia atrata), which is native to northern Europe, is said to have been used to cause miscarriage. However, there are no recorded cases of poisoning, and it is often a favourite in children’s gardens because of its interesting flowers and bee-attracting properties. Plus, certain Native American tribes have long eaten the flowers, which I imagine are very sweet due to the concentrated nectar that they contain.

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) used the plant medicinally as a treatment for swollen glands, and it was also used to hasten childbirth. As with most herbal remedies, the dosage and the wisdom and understanding with which the plants were used has been largely lost, to all of our detriment.

Many species of moth caterpillar munch upon the poor old columbine, and one of them is the saddleback looper, the larva of The Engrailed (Ectropis crepuscularia). The moth is not particularly exciting to look at, but I include it here because I have learned that the word ‘engrailed’ means ‘to have semicircular indentations along the edge’ in heraldry. You’re welcome.

A plant which has been grown in the UK since the 13th century is bound to have attracted some folklore, and one story is that lions ate columbine in order to give themselves strength – it was said that, to get the courage of a lion, all you needed to do was to rub the plant over your hands. However, if you are female and someone gives you a bunch of columbine, this is an indication that you are said to have ‘flexible morals’, and I think you would be well within your rights to summon up the courage of a lion and ‘clip them round the ear’ole’ as my Dad used to say.

And, of course, a poem or two. When I looked for ‘Columbine poems’,  I found many, many works about the school shooting at Columbine, a great outpouring of grief and rage and questioning. But I was most intrigued by, firstly, this work by Melissa Stein, who we encountered a few weeks ago writing about lily of the valley.

And to end on a less distressing note, here is Emily Dickinson. There is a fine blogpost here by someone who is reproducing Emily Dickinson’s garden, and what a lovely idea that is.

It’s Father’s Day here today as I write, and for some reason this poem made me think of my mother. See what you think.

Columbine

by Emily Dickinson

Glowing in her bonnet-
Glowing in her cheek-
Glowing is her Kirtle-
Yet she cannot speak.

Better as the Daisy
From the summer hill
Vanish unrecorded
Save by tearful rill-

Save by loving sunrise
Looking for her face.
Save by feet unnumbered
Pausing at the place.

Photo Credits

Photo One by By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5516707

Photo Two by By Dcrjsr – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10776732

Photo Three by Dcrjsr – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50586172

Photo Four By Walter Siegmund (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5491242

Photo Five by Roo72 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

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Dear Readers, I can never get past my mental image of a fox tiptoeing around the garden wearing pink ‘gloves’ on each foot when I look at this plant. The allusion goes right back to the Anglo Saxon, when it was known as ‘foxes glova‘, and the Latin name digitalis means ‘finger-like’. In some parts of the country it is also known as fairy gloves. I remember putting the spent blooms on my fingers and drawing little faces on them when I was a child, and Richard Mabey reports how, by leaving the stem of each flower intact, they can be turned into ‘claws’. In Vickery’s Folk Flora, there are many tales of children using the flowers as tiny balloons, holding each end of the flower and pushing the ends until they popped. It was also considered a great game to capture a bumblebee inside one of the flowers, and to delight in its frantic buzzing. In the Forest of Dean, foxgloves were known as ‘snowpers’, and a favourite admonition to a noisy child was ‘Shut thee chops; thee bist like a bumble bee in a snowper’. Certainly these always feel like the most playful of plants, and from memory they seemed to be in full bloom at just about the time that the school holidays started.

Foxgloves are certainly having their moment ‘in the sun’ (though they are actually woodland flowers and most varieties don’t thrive without some shade). Every time I go to the garden centre there seem to be new varieties in every shade of cream, apricot, white and pink. They are biennials, bulking up during year one and producing flowers in year two. They self-seed enthusiastically, and are beloved by bumblebees. Digitalis purpurea is native to most of temperate Europe, but is also naturalised in many parts of North America. It is, rather counter-intuitively, a member of the plantain family (Plantaginaceae) which has been muchly enlarged of late.

The story of foxgloves, however, is most closely associated with its toxicity and its medicinal properties. The leaves of foxglove were long used as a diuretic against dropsy (fluid accumulation), but it was also known that foxglove was toxic, and that giving the wrong dosage could be fatal. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey describes how it was a study of the plant’s usage by botanist and physician William Withering that created the split between traditional herbalism and modern pharmacology.

Withering realised that the principal action of foxglove was on the heart, slowing and strengthening its beat and hence, in dropsy, stimulating the kidneys to clear fluid from the body. He also noted that the leaf could be useful in cases of heart failure. However, he insisted on carefully measured doses of the dried leaf, and was aware that too high a dose could cause the heart to falter and cease. Over time, the foxglove’s key active ingredient, digitalis, was isolated and purified, and is used today (as digitoxin and digoxin) for heart conditions. Incidentally, if you have an elderly relative taking either of these drugs who seems to be in a habit of falling, do check that the drug is not lowering blood pressure too much. Dad had six falls in as many months until a junior doctor checked his medication and realised what was happening.

These days, the chemicals for medication are largely prepared from imported leaves of a European foxglove, Digitalis lanata. However, during both World Wars the leaves were gathered and dried by members of The Womens’ Institute, just to make sure that there was an adequate supply. In 1941 the women of the Oxfordshire Women’s Institute collected enough foxglove leaves to provide 350,000 doses of the drug (enough to treat 1,000 patients for a year). Never underestimate a group of woman on a mission.

Although the plant is very poisonous, it is also emetic, which means that you are likely to vomit before suffering the worst cardiac effects. However, it was used as a salad ingredient by someone trying to murder their husband (in Colorado in 2010). The husband realised that the salad tasted bitter, but thought it was one of these antsy-fancy new leaves that are all the rage (I can relate). He suffered a gastrointestinal upset but survived, and his wife was sentenced to four and a half years in jail.

In the Vickery book mentioned earlier, it seems that foxglove was also used for a deeply sinister purpose: the killing of unwanted children. There are several folk legends indicating that foxglove is poisonous to ‘fairies’, and it was used as a test to see if a sickly child was a changeling ( a fairy child who had been exchanged for the original human child) in both County Leitrim and Caernarvonshire, the latter as recently as 1857. A child was given a small dose of foxglove, and it was believed that if the child was human, it would survive, whereas if it was a fairy it would die. It would not take a very large dose to kill a child, especially one who was already ill.  Vickery comments that

‘Thus it seems that the use of foxglove (and other ordeals to which supposed changelings were subjected) might have been an acceptable method of infanticide which enabled families to rid themselves of sickly offspring‘.

The poisonous nature of the plant doesn’t put off the caterpillars of the foxglove pug moth (Eupithecia pulchellata), who feed on the internal parts of the flowers, after sewing them shut with silk. Both moth and caterpillar are unassuming in appearance, but for sheer ingenuity I think they deserve a brief moment of fame here.

And now, a picture. Regular readers will know of my fondness for Vincent Van Gogh, who loved flowers of all kinds so much that I believe he saw into their innermost nature. The portrait below shows Dr Paul Gachet, a homeopath and medical doctor, who took care of Van Gogh following his release from the asylum at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, and was with the artist for the last few months of his life. Following an inauspicious start, Van Gogh grew to love Dr Gachet, describing him as ‘a true friend, something like another brother’. The portrait shows Dr Gachet with a bunch of foxgloves, probably as an indication of his medical background. Van Gogh painted two versions of the picture, and said that:

“I’ve done the portrait of M. Gachet with a melancholy expression, which might well seem like a grimace to those who see it… Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how many portraits ought to be done… There are modern heads that may be looked at for a long time, and that may perhaps be looked back on with longing a hundred years later”.

Six weeks later, Van Gogh shot himself in the woods surrounding Dr Gachet’s home.

In 1990 the painting was bought by Ryoei Saito, chairman of the Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co, for $82m, making it the world’s most expensive painting at the time. The 75 year-old businessman was so fond of the painting that he threatened to have it cremated with him. When Saito died in 1996, the painting seems to have been sold, but the new owner suffered financial problems and sold it on again. Like so many masterpieces, it is probably now in a vault somewhere, or in a secret private collection.

And of course, a poem. Here is ‘The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves’ by Anne Stevenson, which manages to combine close observation with a sly humour.

 

Photo Two by user janenannierocks at waarneming.nl, a source of nature observations in the Netherlands. – This image is uploaded as image number 3702949 at waarneming.nl, a source of nature observations in the Netherlands.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 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20563006

Dear Readers, I am now home for eighteen whole days, which is my longest stay in East Finchley for at least a year. But before I tell you about London, I want to give you an update from my latest visit to Dad’s nursing home in Dorchester. Dad was chatting away to a new chap  when I arrived at the home. P had been in the forces and had lived abroad extensively, and, as Dad travelled a fair bit when he was a gin distiller, they were gently ‘one-upping’ one another with tales of jaunts abroad. I have learned that while people with dementia don’t always get their facts in perfect order, there is normally a kernel of truth in what they say however confused they are, and I have no doubt that P had lived in the Far East, and had learned Japanese.  P had a postcard from his daughter which he was showing to everyone who came in. Dad had been planning to write a letter to me, my brother and Mum, and had started to write it on one of the handkerchiefs that I bought him, but when I asked him about it he’d forgotten what he wanted to write. I was surprised both that he could still spell my name, and that he could still write. I’ve left him with a pad and some pens in case the urge to write strikes him again.

Dad’s face absolutely lights up when I walk in, and it’s one of the greatest joys of my life. I tell him when I’m going to visit him, but he always forgets. This time, he grabbed my hand and kissed it.

‘I didn’t know you were going to come in’, he said, and cried.

Dementia has made Dad more emotional, gentler. He has developed a taste for Portuguese custard tarts and ‘frothy coffee’, and it touches me how much he enjoys both of them. I thought that maybe he would be upset by the unusual behaviour of some of the other residents, but he seems completely at ease with them, and sometimes tries to help if someone has ‘lost’ something or seems particularly distressed.

One lady asked if I’d seen her daughter, and I told her that I hadn’t seen her today, but I was sure she’d  be in soon (she visits her Mum very regularly).

‘She’s the best girl in the world’, said the lady, and I had to go outside because that was what Mum always said about me.

One of the guys, B, used to be a London taxi driver and hasn’t lost any of the repartee. One of the carers asked him if he liked children.

‘I like children but I couldn’t eat a whole one’, he said.

When I popped in on Wednesday to have breakfast with Dad and to say goodbye, he was all geared up to ‘walk into town and have a look at a secondhand car’. I know that Dad misses driving, but while I’m sure he could do the mechanics of driving, he wouldn’t know where he was going. Fortunately, the home had organised a trip to the local market, and Dad was going to help choose some plants for the garden.

‘We’ll have a look at the cars if we can find any’, said the carer.

Initially I was really disconcerted at the degree to which I needed to lie to Dad about what was going to happen, and yet the alternative is so much more distressing and painful for him. No one is going to tell him that he will never own a car or drive again, and so the constant promise of it in the future keeps him calm and happy. There was a positive spring in his step as he headed off with his zimmer frame to get his jacket on, and I know that once he’s in the market he’ll be distracted by all the minutiae of tomato varieties and which geraniums are best.

As I waved goodbye, all the other residents waved as well. It really is a little family.

And yet when I got back to London, I was having a coffee and got into a chat with a lady who had a little dog. We talked about pets for a bit, and then I mentioned that I was just back from visiting with my Dad who has dementia. She sympathised, and then, as she was getting up to go, she turned and said

‘Oh, I do hope it doesn’t drag on too long for you’.

And yet again I was lost for words. I know that dementia is a terminal and progressive disease, but really? I think not just about my dad, but about all the people in the home that I’m getting to know, and I know that not only do they have a quality of life that makes it worth living, but that they are still valuable, loving human beings. This is the fourth time in the past six months that someone has suggested that my Dad and his friends would be better off dead, and that I must be hoping for such a speedy outcome. What does it say about our society that we can wish the oldest and most vulnerable people in it dead? My Dad is teaching me lessons about compassion and patience and understanding every single day.

And so, I really needed the solace of the garden when I got home, and all kinds of things were going on.

Take the fabulous cabbage palm (Cordyline australis) next door, for example. This year it is carrying three whole spikes full of flowers which are constantly abuzz with honeybees. I went outside to take a photograph and realised how sweet-smelling it is. No wonder the bees love it.

Outside the back door, I notice that everything is hideously overgrown, and that the pond is turning into a bog as fast as I can pull things out. However, some yellow flag irises are flowering for the first time this year. I can’t even remember planting them, so maybe they came with something else. This will certainly be something for the dragonfly larvae to climb up, and I check every day just in case.

And I love the way that the sunlight touches the water. The pond is absolutely full of frogs of all sizes this year, from adults to tiny new froglets the size of my fingernail. They are hanging around a lot later this year too, so maybe being so overgrown isn’t such an absolutely bad thing.

My white foxgloves are flowering, and the Bowles Mauve perennial wallflower is covered in bumblebees.

And so is the mock orange, which is just finishing but which is still headily-scented.

But there has been one disaster. The box moth caterpillars have been particularly vigorous this year – last year I managed to trim the bush back in the spring and get rid of most of the damage, but this year they have killed the bushes completely. I shall be cutting them back, digging them out and planting something else. I even spotted one of the caterpillars walking nonchalantly across the path a few days ago, probably en route from one bush to another. This is a pest that has marched through the  country over the past ten years, although the adult moth is rather lovely. I spotted the first one I’d ever seen at the Barbican Centre in London in 2015, but it was noticed in private gardens in 2011. It has probably arrived in imported box plants (the moth comes originally from East Asia) and while it can be treated with nematodes if caught in the early stages, the advice from RHS Wisley is to plant something else. Climate change is making the environment much more pleasant for the moth, and I suspect that we are going to have to adapt too. Privet, anyone?

And, in more exciting news, we are going to get our external decorations done. It’s been more than ten years, and the paintwork is, shall we say, a bit on the dodgy side. The scaffolding is up, but the best news is that I have bought this.

Sparrows like to nest communally, and so I have this little terrace of nestboxes that I have persuaded the decorator to put up for me while he’s on the scaffolding. Sparrows have already been investigating the eaves but have never stayed, so I am very hopeful that maybe next year they’ll take up residence. And if they don’t, maybe somebody else will. And once that’s done, I shall be looking into getting the garden back into some kind of order. I need to move my centre of gravity back east from Dorset, and start getting back into my own life. It will be interesting to see how that works out.