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

Dear Readers, in my search for a Wednesday Weed I have written about some tiny plants: chickweed, shepherd’s purse and hairy bittercress all come to mind. But this tiny survivor, with its chocolate-coloured heart-shaped leaves, almost escaped my attention. It was inching its way along the edge of a wall, accompanied by general detritus and some busy black ants, and seemed far too dainty for a city environment, but there it was.

Later in the spring, it will have bright yellow, five-petalled flowers, but for now it’s just a bracelet of leaves. They aren’t always as dark-coloured as in my plant, as you can see from the example below.

It seems hard to imagine, but this miniscule plant is apparently a ferocious weed given half a chance. It fires its seeds explosively (leading to a German name that translates as ‘red jumping clover’) and it also roots at the stem nodules, spreading laterally. It will grow from a tiny stem fragment, and so is hard to eradicate. Because it is so inconspicous, it is often introduced into the garden in the soil that surrounds plants purchased from garden centres, and this is thought to be a popular route for several other related species, such as the least yellow sorrel(Oxalis exilis) from New Zealand and the upright yellow sorrel (Oxalis stricta) from North America. Once here, yellow sorrels seem to be able to thrive in the merest teaspoonful of  soil.

Procumbent yellow sorrel is also known as creeping wood sorrel, or as sleeping beauty. It was already a weed in Somerset in 1585, but it is so ubiquitous that its area of origin is unknown, though it is thought to be from the Old World. It is now the 24th commonest alien weed in London (out of a list of 30 such plants) according to my copy of  ‘Alien Plants’ by Clive Stace – it is just beaten to 23rd place by michaelmas daisy, but gets in above red valerian in 25th place. In number one position is…….buddleia! Out of those 30 ‘weeds’ I have covered 18 in the Wednesday Weed, so I have some ideas now for other plants I should look out for.

But I digress, as usual.

There are apparently many medicinal uses for procumbent yellow sorrel: it has been used as a cure for intestinal worms, as a treatment for cancer and to stop vomiting. That it has also been used as an insecticide should give us a heads up that this is a potentially poisonous plant: it contains oxalic acid, which in vast quantities can cause kidney damage and gout. However, as the Oxalic Acid website says, the only plant which contains enough of this substance to cause a problem is rhubarb, and then you’d have to eat an estimated eleven pounds of the leaves (not the stalks) to get a lethal dose.

There are a lot of recipes for sorrel out there on the internet, but one problem is confusion with that other sorrel, Rumex acetosa, a member of the dock family and the usual chief ingredient of Sorrel Soup. I shall have to do a separate post on ‘proper’ sorrel when I next find some in the cemetery, but in the meantime, do not waste your time picking those tiny purple leaves. It will take you about three hours to get enough (if you can find them) and I fear that, in East Finchley at least, the chance of dog contamination is astronomically high.

However, in India (where the plant is known as Changeri)  the leaves are used seasonally in salads and, like all wood-sorrels, they do have a slightly acidic, lemon-like taste. Maybe they would work as a sprinkling of oh so trendy micro-greens if you could find a clean source. They would certainly be very pretty.

As you might know, I am a great lover of words, and this whole post had me pondering about the word ‘sorrel’. We know that it’s used for two separate kinds of plants, but it’s also used to describe the coppery chestnut colour of a horse. This gives me a chance to share one of my favourite paintings, ‘Whistlejacket’ by George Stubbs. Whistlejacket is undoubtedly a sorrel horse, and I love that Stubbs has depicted him without the usual bridle and saddle and rider. This feels like a true portrait of an animal as an individual, rather than as something owned and being used as a status symbol, though this is what the horse was. Stubbs seems to reach over the head of his owner, and to see the horse as a ‘person’. All great art, I would argue, alerts us to the particular, and allows us to make connections to our own lives.

But why ‘sorrel’? One theory is that is nothing to do with our little plant, but is because of the colour of the ripe seedheads of that other sorrel, the member of the dock family. I shall leave you to decide if this is credible or not.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Yellow procumbent sorrel flowering in paving crack) – I, Uwe W. [CC BY-SA 2.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en) or CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two (Yellow procumbent sorrel in flower) – By picture taken by Olaf Leillinger – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2199050

Photo Three (Sorrel soup) – By Michał Sulik (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Four (Common sorrel) – By Michał Sulik (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

All other blog content copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

 

 

 

 

 

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

Dear Readers, the lungwort is in full flower in several locations around my ‘territory’ at the moment, and the early-emerging queen bumblebees are delighted. And, actually, so am I, for this is one of my favourite plants. I love the jaguar-spotted leaves  – in one story, Mary is supposed to have been a little careless while feeding the baby Jesus, hence one of the alternative names for lungwort, ‘Mary-spilt-the-milk. I also love the way that the flowers start off pink and gradually move through lilac to blue (hence ‘Jacob’s Coat’). Plus, the plant is a member of the Boragaceae or borage family, which includes the exquisite blue borage itself, and good old ‘bone-knit’, comfrey. All of these are medicinal plants of great antiquity, and are also all beloved by pollinators. You can’t go far wrong with a borage.

The word ‘officinalis’ in a plant’s species name means that this was the ‘official’ cure for a condition. The combination of the shape of the leaves and those white spots was thought to be an indication that the plant could be used to cure spots on the lungs, catarrh, and coughs. The slightly hairy leaves are mucilaginous, which implied that they would soothe such conditions, and the usual treatment was to use the leaves in a tea. These days their primary use seems to be as a novel, early-flowering plant in a woodland garden.

The way that the flowers change colour is certainly very fetching, and I can’t help thinking how lovely they would be in a child’s garden. But what makes the flowers change colour as they grow older? A pigment in the petals changes from acidic (pink) to alkaline (blue) during the plant’s life, and this may occur once the plant is pollinated, or may simply be a result of age. The younger pink flowers have much more nectar and pollen than the blue ones. Does the colour act as a signal to the bees, telling them which plants are worth feeding from? Several studies have indicated that this might be the case.  Retaining the blue flowers also means that the overall display is much more visible from a distance than if the older flowers just dropped off.

The caterpillars of Ethmia pusiella feed only on lungwort, or its close relative the gromwell. As an adult, the moth reminds me of one of those appaloosa horses that popped up in the cowboy movies of my youth.

Below we see two colour forms of the moth and an upwardly-mobile caterpillar feeding on gromwell, a close relative of lungwort.

In The Language of Flowers, edited by Frederic Shoberl in 1835, lungwort is listed as the plant of the Feast Day of St Leander on February 27th. St Leander was a Spanish saint who died in 600 AD, worn out by his work with the Visigoths. Why the connection with lungwort, I have no idea, except that this is, as we’ve noticed, an early-flowering plant, and one which is native to the whole of Europe and western Asia. it is not, however, native to the UK, arriving here in 1597 (probably as a medicinal) and bursting forth into our woody places by 1793. Some of its showier varieties are also popular garden plants, and indeed the ones that I’ve spotted are undoubtedly garden escapes, or deliberately planted. If you prefer flowers that are white, or more brightly coloured than those in the picture, they can easily be bought online or in your garden centre. However, beware: lungworts love to cross-pollinate, and your subsequent plants may return to the motley of the original.

Although the leaves look rather inedible, they have been used in salads, and on her website ‘The Backyard Patch Herbal Blog’, Marcy Lautanen-Raleigh recommends using the rather slimy cooked leaves as a replacement for okra. She has some interesting recipes for the plant on her website here.

I was also delighted to discover that lungwort had a whole day for itself in the French Revolutionary  Rural calendar, used from 1789 to 1805, and for 18 days during the Paris Commune of 1871. All the months were had 30 days each, starting from the autumn equinox, and were named for the weather around Paris. Each week had ten days. The naming of the individual days in what was known as the Rural calendar was intended to turn the eyes and hearts of agricultural people away from all these Saints Days, and towards the more secular beauties of the countryside. Every tenth day was named for a farming implement, so the tenth day  of Brumaire (in October) was Charrue, or plough. Every fifth day was named for a common animal, so the fifth day of Brumaire was Oie, or goose. And in between came the plants. Lungwort crept in on the 19th day of Pluviose (20th January to 18th February), as ‘Pulmonaire’, and here is an attractive lady coping with the inclement weather of the month.

I rather like the idea of having days named after plants and animals. My birthday, as it turns out, would have been named for the spurge-laurel (which has not yet featured as a Wednesday Weed) and if you would like to check out your own birthday, just for the fun of it, you can find all the details here.

There is much to love about lungwort. The incredible colour-changing flowers with their messages to the bees, the white-spotted lung-shaped leaves, the February flowering and the possibility of using the plant to replace okra, surely the most demonic vegetable ever invented (with the possible exception of the jerusalem artichoke). I have tried and failed to grow it in my garden many times, probably because, according to Monty Don, it will be very prone to mildew if it dries out in the summer. Maybe I will try again, with a watering can to hand.

Photo Credits

Photo One (moth) – By José Ramón P. V. – Flickr: Ethmia pusiella IMG_1060, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20651046

Photo Two (Pluviose) – By Tresca, Salvatore (Graveur) – Lafitte, Louis (Dessinateur du modèle) – http://cghaubiere.blogspot.it/2012/01/calendrier-republicain.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36981503

All other blog content copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

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

Dear Readers, last year I decided to finally get my act together and plant some woodland bulbs. With the help of my husband I planted snowdrops and cyclamen, lily of the valley and bluebells, and some winter aconite. I had been hoping for a carpet of spring colour. Instead, I have exactly two winter aconites, and a small early crop of stinging nettles. Whether the squirrels have had the lot or they’re just late is anybody’s guess. So I was particularly pleased to spot this fine collection of yellow beauties in a church yard in Camden, not far from Regent’s Park.

Winter aconites are a member of the buttercup family, but they always remind me of tiny saffron waterlilies. In Suffolk (where they seem to be particularly abundant) they are known as ‘choirboys’ because the ruff of leaves rather resembles the neckline of a choirboy’s costume.  The plant came originally from southern Europe and was apparently first introduced to the UK in 1596. By 1838 they were recorded in the wild, and are now seen in churchyards and verges, usually close to human habitation. However, there is a legend that winter aconites only grow where the blood of Roman soldiers was spilled, which implies that either the plants are time-travellers, or they were here a lot earlier than their documented first appearance. This Roman connection was a source of inspiration for the crime novelist Dorothy L.Sayers, who moved close to a Roman camp at Bluntisham, near Cambridge when she was a little girl, and was delighted by the winter aconites. When her father told her the story, her interest in ancient Rome was triggered. Although better known for her Sir Peter Wimsey detective novels, she became something of a classicist, and would explore this in her non-fiction work ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’, which advocated a return to the skills of logic, grammar and rhetoric. I can’t help wondering if, with the current level of political argument, she might have had a point.

Winter aconites are not actually members of the Aconite family but on the ever-informative Poison Garden website, John Robertson explains that the leaves look like those of the true aconites. This might also be why the plant has a reputation for being poisonous: all buttercups are poisonous to a degree, but true aconites, such as Monkshood (Aconitum napellus) are among the most toxic plants in the garden. I have only been able to find two documented cases of death through winter aconite poisoning, The first was an elderly German dachshund with a history of plant ingestion. The other is from the Plant Lives website, and mentions the death, in 1822, of the unfortunate Mrs Gorst, who is said to have  harvested winter aconite tubers after mistaking them for horseradish. Suffice it to say that eating decorative garden plants is never a great idea for any creature, human or otherwise.

As one of the earliest flowering of all  bulbs, winter aconite is a real boon in a woodland garden (or would be if it actually grew). They are known as spring ephemerals, because they take advantage of the light that filters through to the forest floor before the foliage appears on the trees, and disappear later in the year. In this, they mimic their close relative, the lesser celandine. Even snow does not deter the winter aconite. For the rest of the year, the plant hides beneath the leaf litter as a bulb, waiting for its moment of glory when everything else is still dormant.

Winter aconite has inspired a number of artists, including Sir Stanley Spencer, more famous for his figurative paintings involving his home village of Cookham. Here is a painting that he made on commission for the wife of the local vicar, the Reverend Canon Westropp. It was sold at Bonhams in 2013 for £51,650, and I suspect that this might have been a bargain. Spencer had always made studies of local flora to include in his landscape paintings, but the floral paintings were small and sold well. Spencer worked on some of these paintings between his more famous works, and seems to have taken a great deal of care over them: he commented that one of his plant pictures, ‘Magnolias’, was ‘as good as anything that I’ve ever done’. There is certainly a lot of love in ‘Winter Aconites’, painted in 1957, towards the end of Spencer’s life (he died in 1959).

And I would like to finish with a poem, because that’s always a good way to finish in my experience. The poet Freda Downie, who died in 1993, was born in Shooter’s Hill, evacuated to Northamptonshire, returned to London in time for the Blitz, left when it finished and with impeccable timing was brought back to London in time for the V1 and V2 rockets. I love her poem Aconites, which feels just right for this time of the year, and even mentions a blackbird.

“Winter holds fast,
But a little warmth escapes like sand
Through the closed fingers.
The error is annual and certain,
Letting the pygmy flowers
Make their prompt appearance
Under creaking trees.
They stand with serious faces, green ruffled,
As prim as Tudor portraits.


In the west
The greys and gleam slide in the wind
And only the descended blackbird
Augments the intrepid yellow.”

Photo Credits

Photo One (Winter Aconites by Stanley Spencer) https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/20776/lot/69/

Freda Downie’s poem was published on the Greentapestry website here

All other blog content free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you!

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

Dear Readers, during a walk along through the lanes of Somerset a few weeks ago I was amazed by how subtropical the hedgerows looked. Everywhere the long, green leaves of hart’s tongue fern were decorating the path, bringing a welcome touch of shiny emerald enthusiasm to the otherwise browning foliage.  A field of snowdrops didn’t go amiss, either.

The hart’s tongue fern is a member of the Asplenium or spleenwort family, a group of over 700 mostly tropical species. This fern is the only UK species with long, strap-like leaves, which become wavy at the edges as the plant grows older – the name ‘hart’s tongue’ refers to their similarity (in shape though not, we hope, in colour) to the tongue of a young red deer stag. The plant likes shallow soil and is often found growing among the roots of trees and bushes, or in cracks in walls. You can also buy it from many garden centres, and a healthy specimen is a most attractive plant, though they do become rather dog-eared in time (as do most of us).

Hart’s tongue fern is a common plant in the UK, especially in the south-west of England which is where I found this colony. It is native plant of the northern hemisphere, but is rare in the US, occurring in isolated populations, with the American subspecies being classified as Endangered (at least until the current government de-lists it along with all the other lifeforms covered by the Endangered Species Act, but that’s another story).

Why spleenwort, though? Well, as we remember from our discussion of the male fern a few weeks ago, ferns do not produce seeds, or indeed flowers, but instead produce spores. Those of the hart’s tongue fern are very distinctive, producing rows of chocolate-coloured spores on the underside of the leaves, which are shed between August and March. In the photo below, the spores have already gone, but the marks of the sporangia that would have contained them are very clear. The whole ensemble puts me in mind of those lime-flavoured sweets with chocolate filling that I used to munch as a child, but maybe I’m just sugar-deprived. Anyhow, the shape of the sporangia reminded medieval peoples of the shape of the spleen, which indicated to them that the plant was good for treating ailments of this organ via the Doctrine of Signatures (already discussed several times, such as in this piece on nipplewort)

Apparently the lines of dark brown reminded whoever named the plant of a centipede, as scolopendrium is the Latin name of this invertebrate.

According to A Modern Herbal, hart’s tongue fern is useful for liver diseases of all kinds, and for hardness and stoppings of the spleen. The herbalist Culpepper mentions that

‘The distilled water is very good against the passion of the heart, to stay hiccough, to help the falling of the palate and to stay bleeding of the gums by gargling with it’.

Many years before Culpepper, Galen gave it in infusion for dysentery and diarrhoea, and in country areas in the UK it was used in an ointment for burns and scalds.

One rather lovely story about hart’s tongue fern explains one of its alternative names, godshaer. The story tells that, during his wanderings, Jesus become tired, and lay down beside a stream, resting his head on a pillow of hart’s tongue fern. When, refreshed, he awoke and moved on, he left two of his hairs embedded in the plant and, if you break the stipe (the rib in the middle of the leaf) you will find two black ‘hairs’ (actually vascular bundles). If only I had known this story when I was in Somerset I would have given this a go, so feel free to investigate if you pass a plant in your travels (though do apologise to the poor fern first).

The Ainu people of Japan mix hart’s tongue fern with tobacco and smoke it. And the physicians of Myddfai in Wales recommended it particularly for women:

“If you would always be chaste, eat daily some of the herb called hart’s tongue, and you will never assent to the suggestions of impurity.”

Well, harrumph to that. At my age I need all the suggestions of impurity that I can get. But I digress.

And finally, does anyone eat this plant? In North America, young ferns known as fiddleheads are a great delicacy. However, some ferns contain carcinogens, or substances that cause Vitamin B1 deficiency, so this eating ferns is not an activity for the reckless. However, our old friend Robin over at the Eat Weeds website has gone where the brave fear to tread, and his recipe for Buttered Hart’s Tongue Fiddleheads is here.

When I talked about male fern in a previous Wednesday Weed, I mentioned a craze in Victorian times for collecting ferns, called pteridomania. I am very glad that I wasn’t born during this period, for I imagine that you couldn’t walk around a drawing room without sweeping a glass dome full of ailing ferns off of a side table with your bustle. Furthermore, even if you were working-class there was always some Victorian gentleman artist at his easel,  capturing your slightly grubby, poverty-stricken beauty as you tried to go about your work. So here, for your delectation, is The Fern Gatherer by Charles Sillem Lidderdale (1831- 1895). Is that a tiny hart’s tongue fern grasped in the over-worked hand of this maiden? I do believe it is.

Photo Credits

Photo One (American hart’s tongue fern) – By Linda Swartz – http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/images/hartstonguefern/asplenium_scolopendrium_americanum_hab_lg.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12221569

Photo Two (The Fern Gatherer) – By Charles Sillem Lidderdale – Bonhams, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17926598

All other blog content copyright Vivienne Palmer. Free to use and share non-commercially, but please attribute and link back to the blog, thank you.