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, you might think that something as full of poisonous barbs as a stinging nettle would be a most unlikely choice for turning into fabric. But in fact, the plant’s stems are used to produced bast fibre – this is the inner layer of the stem of the plant, and it produces a flexible material suitable for turning into cloth. This is also the part of the flax and hemp plants that are used for fabrics. In stinging nettles, it has the great advantage of not reducing the wearer to a mass of boils.

In order to get to the bast fibre layer, however, the plant has to go through a process called retting (another great new word for my collection). Bundles of nettle stems are submerged in water for between 8 and 14 days, during which time the plant absorbs water, bursting the outer layer and making the bast fibre easy to extract. The time needs to be judged carefully, however: if submerged for too long you end up with an extremely useful but smelly fertiliser, rich in nitrogen, magnesium, iron and sulphur and great for encouraging leafy growth.

Once the fibre has been extracted, the textiles can be created. People have been wearing nettle clothes for at least 2000 years, and why not – the plants grow everywhere with very little encouragement or the use of pesticides, and they make a decent replacement for cotton or linen. Indeed, during the First World War, German uniforms were made from nettles following a cotton shortage.

In Scotland, nettles were used for bed sheets and tablecloths. Sue Eland’s Plantllives website has an extensive section on stinging nettle, and reports how the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) describes the use of the fabric:

‘I have slept in nettle sheets, and dined offa nettle tablecloth, and I have heard my mother say that she thought nettle cloth more durable than any other linen.’

More recently, a number of experiments have been done into the use of nettles for clothing: De Montfort University has created some rather pretty dresses, but my chief question here is how on earth do they stay up? Or on? Clearly they weren’t designed by a woman. But I digress, as usual. There is also a bright pink nettle bikini worn by a lady in boots, but I shall spare you. Enough to say that nettle fabric is due for a comeback, and indeed many companies are already interested in producing it.

Nettle leaves can be used to produce a greenish-yellow dye, and the roots produce a yellow one. Truly this plant is a generous one.

As you might expect for a plant with such polarising qualities, there is a huge volume of folklore concerning nettles. Stinging nettle was one of the Nine Sacred Herbs of the Anglo-Saxons, which was believed to ward off evil. It was also one of the five bitter herbs that are eaten by Jewish people during the Feast of Passover.

In Yorkshire the plant was used in exorcism ceremonies. Frogs could be kept from beehives (I had no idea that this was a problem) and flies from larders by hanging up a bunch of the plant. A child’s eyesight could be improved if you blew through a leaf into the affected eye. Fever could be cured if a nettle (preferably growing in a shady area) was grasped and uprooted whilst intoning the name of the patient and their parents – a kind of trial by ordeal, where the suffering of the person who went through the ritual was used to benefit the sick person.

The stinging properties of nettles were also used in the treatment of ailments such as rheumatism, the counter-irritant properties of the blisters and the heat produced being seen as a way to alleviate the symptoms.

In Buddhism, the yogi Milarepa reached enlightenment while living in a Himalayan cave and subsisting on a diet of nettle soup, which turned his skin green. At one point he was offered meat, but when he saw that some of it was being consumed by maggots, he understood that it was not fair to deprive the insects of their food, and went back to the nettles. After many trials, he became an influential and revered Buddhist teacher, and if you want to read about his long and eventful life, you can find the full story here.

“Maintain the state of undistractedness and distractions will fly off.
Dwell alone and you shall find a friend.
Take the lowest place and you shall reach the highest.
Hasten slowly and you will soon arrive.
Renounce all worldly goals and you shall reach the highest goal.”

And so, our tour of stinging nettles has taken us from an alley in East Finchley to the mountains of the Himalayas. I can think of few plants that have been as useful to us, but also as reviled. For some, the nettle has been food, medicine, clothes and a source of inspiration. For others, it’s a spiteful and pernicious perennial weed, to be rooted out at all costs. F.Scott Fitzgerald once said that ‘The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function‘, and this is often so true of our relationships with the natural world. Stinging nettles sting, but may also treat rheumatism. They love to grow in our gardens, but provide a home for peacock butterflies. No person is perfectly good, or perfectly bad, and yet we still manage to love one another, and it’s the same with the plants and animals that we share our world with. Let us make some room for the nettle, as we hope that others will make room for us, prickly and astringent as we may be.

Photo Credits

Photo One (nettle stem) – By derivative work: Curtis Clark (talk)Labeledstemforposter_copy.jpg: Ryan R. McKenzie – Labeledstemforposter_copy.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4722197

Photo Two (Nettle dress) – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8692782.stm

Photo Three (Milarepa) – By Sarah Lionheart, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2823766

 

 

 

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 week I looked at the ‘sting’ part of the stinging nettle. However, this is a plant which has been our constant companion for as long as we have lived in these islands, and not surprisingly we have found a myriad ways in which it could help us.

As foraging has been become more popular, so nettle recipes have proliferated. The consensus seems to be that the new tips of the plant should be harvested in March and April, before they set seed and become stringy and unpleasant. In fact, elderly nettles contain gritty particles called ‘cystoliths’ which can irritate the bladder, so refrain from collecting nettles of pensionable age.  No less a luminary than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a great fan of nettles as food, and you can find the instructions for making nettle soup, nettle spanakopita (though technically a spanakopita made of wild plants is called a horopita) and nettle risotto here.

Indeed, stinging nettles have become such a trendy ingredient that they’re finding their way into everything from pasta to pesto, from borek to polenta. Some of these uses are traditional recipes which are being rediscovered: others are new inventions, using nettles in place of more expensive cultivated greens. And with good reason: as noted last week, nettles are very high in Vitamin A and C, and in minerals such as potassum and manganese. They also contain 25% protein (dry weight) which is high for a leafy vegetable.

Plunging nettles into boiling water neutralises their sting, and makes them edible. However, in Dorset there is an annual World Nettle Eating Competition, held in June when the nettles are at their stingiest. It started when two farmers got into an argument about whose fields had the most nettles, and decided that one way to settle the issue was to eat them. The competitors (and numbers are limited to 65) have to eat the leaves from 24 inch-long stalks of nettle. The bare stalks are measured, and the winner is the person with the longest accumulated length. I can only imagine the state of the participants’ lips and throats. There has been some talk, in recent years, of some shady goings-on, with low toxicity nettle being substituted for the local plant. When The Telegraph covered the event, back in 2009, the winners of the men and women’s competitions (for, to my dismay, I find that women are not immune to this madness) both managed to consume the leaves from 48 feet of nettles. The mind fairly boggles. And if you want to see a film of the 2012 event, there is some on the Bottle Inn website here. There is not yet a date for the 2017 competition, but if you are keen to enter (and cannot be dissuaded) you’d better get practising now. The Bottle Inn sounds as if it might be worth a visit at any time, actually: it’s has a 16th Century building, and has won CAMRA West Dorset Pub of the Year in 2014 and 2016. I did wonder if nettles would form part of its menu, but sadly there aren’t any details online.

Humans are not the only animals who consume nettles. You might remember the little green chap who was curled up on the nettle from last week. I suspect that s/he is the caterpillar of an Angle Shades moth, which is a most exquisite creature.

Nettles are also the preferred food plant of some of the Vanessid butterflies, such as the peacock and the red admiral. In the case of the peacock (Aglais io), the pale-green eggs are laid on the underside of the nettle leaves. I love the delicate structure of the eggs – they look like tiny gooseberries.

The black spiky caterpillars emerge and build communal webs. If a hungry blue tit hoves into view, the tiny caterpillars wave and jerk their bodies back and forth in unison, which must give pause to any hungry predator.

Incidentally, it is said that a sudden flash of the eyespots on a peacock butterfly’s wings is enough to deter an animal as big as a hungry chicken. It can also produce a distinct hissing sound by rubbiing its wings together. It might float like a butterfly, but it can certainly defend itself.

The red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) is another butterfly whose caterpillars feed almost solely on nettles. This migrant insect (which is found all over North America, Asia and Europe) lays its eggs singly on the leaves, so this makes them easy to distinguish from the peacock eggs.

The caterpillars make ‘tents’ out of the individual nettle leaves, sewing them around themselves as protection, and moving to bigger leaves as they grow. I will never forget my distress when my favourite patch of nettles in the local community garden, full of red admiral caterpillars, was strimmed to the ground by an over-zealous volunteer. Our urge to keep things tidy can be a real threat to wildlife, especially invertebrates. Fortunately, there is rarely a shortage of nettles in these parts, and long may this continue.

The wings of adult red admirals remind me of brown velvet. What handsome insects they are!

Well, dear readers,  I am starting to realise that even two weeks might not be enough to cover the wondrous stinging nettle. The plant has a long and illustrious history as a medicinal plant, and has also been used to make cloth, plus I haven’t even started on folklore, so I think these attributes are deserving of a third post. But here are some thoughts on the character of this plant, and what I think it teaches us. Nettle has to be handled with knowledge and respect in order to glean its gifts – the unwary will find themselves heartily stung. It makes the most of our damp and unloved places, proving that it’s possible to make something of whatever we are given. And its sting protects not only the plant itself, but the many small creatures that feed upon it, showing how fierceness can be used for good purposes. These are lessons that we need to absorb at the moment: how to be wise, how to be resilient and creative, how to channel our anger for the protection of others. Stinging nettle might be common, but it has an uncommon resonance.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Papardelle) – by T.Tseng https://www.flickr.com/photos/68147320@N02/11043367595

Photo Two (The Bottle Inn) – © Copyright RNE and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Photo Three (Angle Shades) – By ©entomart, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=311443

Photo Four (Peacock Butterfly Eggs) – By W. Schön – http://www.bund-nrw-naturschutzstiftung.de/schmetterling2009.htm, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5654101

Photo Five (Peacock Butterfly Caterpillars) – By aconcagua (talk) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27736513

Photo Five (Peacock Butterfly Adult) – By Charlesjsharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32422546

Photo Six (Red Admiral Eggs) – By Emmanuel Boutet – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1393559

Photo Seven (Red Admiral Caterpillars) – James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Eight (Adult Red Admiral) – HaarFager at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

 

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, I can scarcely believe that I have never featured stinging nettle on The Wednesday Weed , but it seems that it is so. Maybe I have been deterred by the sheer amount that there is to say about this most ubiquitous of ‘weeds’, which has featured in so many of our stories and which has been utilised by us in so many ways. In fact, there is so much to say that, for the first time ever, I am going to feature stinging nettle in two posts, with the second one being published next Wednesday. This week, I am going to concentrate on the thing that makes the nettle most memorable: it’s ability to sting.

It is actually quite unusual for plants to be as fierce in their defence as the stinging nettle is. I vividly recall my first encounter: my Dad had taken over a neglected allotment in Manor Park, East London, close to the towering gas holders. The whole family descended on it one sunny afternoon to clear the waist-high weeds. I grasped a handful of an innocuous looking plant, and felt it stab the palm of my hand. Even as I watched, great blisters came up on my wrists and inner arms. Dad stopped to see what all the wailing was about, and then grabbed a handful of dock leaves and crushed them onto the affected parts. It didn’t quite make it stop hurting, but it was definitely better afterwards, for perfectly valid scientific reasons which are described below.

Today, I was double-checking the foliage of my ‘nettle patch’ to make sure that it was stinging nettle, and so I have a couple of stings on my fingers. They are tingling even as I write. Maybe they will make my prose even more deathless than usual. Well, I can hope.

The leaves and stem of a stinging nettle arecovered in hairs, some of which sting and some of which do not. When the stinging hairs come into contact with something (like a human hand, for example), the ‘cap’ of the hair is broken off, and the sharp point that remains injects chemicals into the skin.

The mixture of ingredients includes a histamine, acetylcholine ( a neurotransmitter), and possibly formic acid. Treatment with an anti-histamine cream will help to alleviate the symptoms,but I find to my delight that dock leaves contain a natural anti-histamine which does the same job. I don’t know about you, but I find that as I get older, the effect of a nettle sting seems to last for longer, and I’m often still a bit tingly and sore several days after a nettle encounter. However, for me nettles are a quintessential part of a day out in the country: they gather under every stile, spring out from every woodland path and hide among the most innocent of greenery. The cry of ‘stinging nettle, mind your arms’ as we trooped through Wanstead Park as small children was as much part of my childhood as orange and lemon cupcakes and spam hedgehogs (mashed potato covered in spammy ‘spikes’ with tomato ketchup for eyes).

Incidentally, all that business about ‘grasping the nettle’ has never worked for me. I know the theory – that being firm with a nettle means that the stinging hairs will be forced to lay down flat against the stem and so pain will be prevented – but I’ve never known a nettle that had read this piece of folklore. Stroke them or grab them, they’ve always behaved just as uncouthly. A thick pair of gardening gloves and long sleeves work for me, though these nettles will happily sting through cotton and even thin summer trousers.

You might think that big animals like deer and cows would not be deterred by a little thing like a sting, but apparently they are. Although they are covered in fur, the lips and tongue of such animals are tender, and they are no fans of getting them covered in hives. So, the theory is that nettles developed their stings to stop themselves from being eaten. Apparently stinging nettles which grow in areas frequented by livestock develop a higher proportion of stinging hairs than those which are not constantly under threat of grazing. The production of such defences must be metabolically expensive for the plant, which is probably why not many species do it. However, the armoury of our stinging nettle pales into insignificance compared to some of its relatives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Stinging Tree or Gympie Gympie (Dendrocnide moroides) of Queensland in Australia has a famously long-lasting and potent sting, and is a member of the nettle family. Here is the testimony of a chap named Ernie Rider, who was slapped in the face and torso by the plant back in 1963:

“For two or three days the pain was almost unbearable; I couldn’t work or sleep, then it was pretty bad pain for another fortnight or so. The stinging persisted for two years and recurred every time I had a cold shower. … There’s nothing to rival it; it’s ten times worse than anything else.”

I must remember this next time I’m complaining about a nettle sting.

The English language has even developed a verb, ‘to nettle’, meaning ‘to irritate or harass’.

The relationship between human habitation and stinging nettles is not accidental. Nettles have a fondness for soil with high levels of phosphate and nitrogen, and so they often indicate spots where humans or animals have urinated or defecated. I think it’s no accident that the finest crop of nettles on the unadopted road in East Finchley is on the corner, a spot where I am willing to bet many chaps have stopped off on their way home from the pub for a wee. It’s said that the outline of Scottish crofts which have otherwise completely disappeared can still be identified by the stinging nettles that grow where the outhouses and middens would have stood, two hundred years after the infamous Highland Clearances took place.

Just a few words here on the sex-life of the nettle. As you might guess from the species name dioica,  nettles are dioecious, which means that some  nettles have male flowers and some have female flowers. The male flowers often have a purplish tinge at some point in their development and are held quite stiffly away from the plant. They have been described as looking like tiny Brussel sprouts.

The female flowers are in long, drooping catkins, and in full bloom are said to look as if they are covered in hoar-frost.

For some excellent photos of male and female nettles, have a look at The Wildflower Finder website.

The purpose of having separate male and female plants is, as usual, to ensure genetic diversity, by making sure that an individual plant can’t pollinate itself. The inconspicuous and plentiful flowers, and their lack of strong colour and scent, is an indication that this is a wind-pollinated plant, and indeed the pollen has been implicated in hay fever and other allergies. However, it is also used by some practitioners as a powerful anti-allergy agent. As we will see next week, stinging nettle has been used by humans in many ways: medicinally, as food, for clothing and as feed for domestic animals. It is also a critical food for many insects, including some of our most exquisite butterflies. But I would like to finish here with a poem that reflects our uneasy relationship with this plant. Vernon Scannell was a soldier during World War 2, and his poem ‘Nettles’ sums up the very human frustration with the natural world’s refusal to bow to our requirements.

Nettles by Vernon Scannell

My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
‘Bed’ seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my hook and honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. Next task: I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead.
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.

Photo Credits

Photo One (diagram of nettle hair) – By Peter coxhead – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27752919

Photo Two (Gympie Gympie Tree) By Cgoodwin – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3380257

Photo Three (Stinging Nettle with male flowers) – By John Tann from Sydney, Australia (Stinging Nettle) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)]

Photo Four (Male Flowers) – By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2513951

Photo Five (Female Flowers) – By Frank Vincentz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2513964

Vernon Scannell Poem taken from https://www.tutorfair.com/blog/gcse-poem-analysis-nettles-by-vernon-scannell

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, during my walk along the Mutton Brook last week I encountered this extraordinary plant growing in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I had never seen anything quite like it before. The leaves resembled a conifer, the flowers looked rather leguminous, and the pink colour of the blooms was a pleasant shock to the retina on a frosty morning. In other words, what on earth was it? Fortunately two of my readers, Mr Baldwin Hamey (or rather, his botanically-minded friend) and Ms Anne Guy were able to identify it as a Grevillea, and once I found out what it was, I had to do some further investigation. It turns out that this plant is a long, long way from home, and that it has some very interesting attributes.

The Grevillea genus contains about 360 species, all of them from the Antipodes (mostly Australia, but a few in New Caledonia, Sulawesi and New Guinea). All of them are endemics, meaning that they grow wild nowhere else in the world. The shapes of the flowers are extraordinary: an alternative name for this species is ‘cats claw’, but there are also many ‘spider flowers’.  Grevillea alpina comes from Victoria and parts of New South Wales. The flowers come in many colours and five different shapes, but the ‘Olympic Flame’ variant has this delightful combination of lollypop pink and snowy white. In their native land, the plants are mainly pollinated by birds, honeycreepers to be specific.

Plants which are bird-pollinated tend to have bright red or pink flowers, and no perfume – most birds (with the exception of kiwis and some vultures) have a poorly-developed sense of smell, so there is no point in the plant using scent to attract them. In the UK, bees may also feed from the flowers, but are able to do so without pollinating the plant, which has not evolved to work with such small creatures – a case of ‘something for nothing’ for the insects. The flowers are also eaten by parrots, who don’t do much for pollination either but are completely charming.

Grevilleas are very nectar-rich, something which the aboriginal people of Australia have long recognised – the nectar can be shaken onto the hand for a quick burst of sweetness and energy, or added to a wooden vessel called a coolamon with some water to make a refreshing drink when on the move. The coolamon is made by moulding the bark of a hardwood tree over a fire to shape it as required. In the picture below, the vessel is lined with paperbark to provide a comfortable bed for a new baby, but for fluids the two halves of the coolamon would have been secured together. I am always in awe of the ability of indigeonous peoples everywhere to make the most of the plants that they find in their environment, and their understanding of the ebb and flow of the natural world that surrounds them.

Should you be tempted to try the nectar of a Grevillea, however, I would advise you to desist, as some of the commonly cultivated Grevilleas contain cyanide.

Grevilleas are named after Charles Francis Greville (1749 – 1849), who developed the harbour at Milford Haven in south Wales, but, more relevantly for this discussion, was the first person to persuade the Vanilla Orchid to flower in the UK. He was good friends with Sir Joseph Banks, who was involved with the Botany Bay colony during its inception, and who has a genus of plants of proteas, the Banksii, named after him too. The ships that brought the convicts to Botany Bay would return home laden down with the best of the flora and fauna that Australia had to offer. The first of the Grevillea plants arrived in 1825, and were hugely popular. However, the conditions for growing these plants are completely different from those present in their original home, and so only a few species can tolerate living outdoors, and even then they are notorious for succumbing to overly wet conditions.

So, dear Readers, I hope you will forgive me for including such an exotic plant in the Wednesday Weed. I have seldom been so astonished by a winter-flowering plant – it was a little like spotting an escaped wallaby, or espying a koala in the weeping willow. I must make a trip to Australia one day: the flora and fauna are unique, and illustrate so well how evolution can come up with extraordinary forms. In the meantime, I will be keeping an eye on this grevillea, and will no doubt now notice hundreds more, as is the way of things.

Photo Credits

Photo One  (Honeyeater) – T. Gerus (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tgerus/15564100412)

Photo Two (Lorikeet) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/zoom_eric/171175004

Photo Three (Coolamon) – By Taken byfir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.auCanon 20D + Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 – Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=445560

Photo Four (Charles Francis Greville) – By George Romney – http://thepeerage.com/p41634.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17078291

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, on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon in January it was hard to find any wild plants to write about for the Wednesday Weed. I was half-tempted to feature the Amaryllis which is doing splendidly in a pot in my writing room, but I can hardly say that I didn’t plant it deliberately. And so I wandered out to the recycle bin and spotted this sad little specimen of male fern, doing its best against the slugs and the darkness and the damp. It has popped up beside a doormat that I keep meaning to throw out, and it provided a welcome hint of fresh green.

Ferns have an otherworldly, alien quality to them. They propagate by spores, rather than by flowers and seeds. At one point in earth’s evolution they were the dominant plants, first appearing during the Carboniferous about 360 million years ago. Dragonflies with 30 inch wingspans flitted among their fronds, and two-foot long scorpions hid in their shade. In short, walking through a fern-forest during this period would have been a rather alarming experience.

The names of the parts of the fern leaf are enigmatic. The stalk is the stipe. The mid-rib is the rachis, as it is in a bird’s feather. Most elegantly of all, an emerging fern, curled up like a caterpillar, is named ‘crozier’ after the bishop’s staff.

You may be wondering why this plant is called ‘male fern’. It appears that when it was named, it was felt to be the partner of a different species, the ‘lady fern’ (pictured above). The male fern was ‘robust in appearance and vigorous in growth’, while the lady fern was altogether more demure. You might argue that it’s this kind of gender stereotyping that’s gone a long way to making a mess of the world, but then I suspect the plants were named a very long time ago.

An alternative name for male fern is ‘worm fern’, which may be a reference to those curly croziers. However, the root of the plant was also used as a remedy for worms (an antihelmintic, another great new word for my collection). Was this because it was actually efficacious (it contains a substance called flavaspidic acid) or was it because the appearance of the worm-like fronds was considered to be an indication from God of what the plant was meant to be used for? Quite probably a bit of both, I suspect. These days, in the West at least, parasitic worms are on the decrease, and there are other remedies if you do contract them.

Incidentally, there are currently some fascinating studies on the effects of infestation with parasites and positive effects on the immune system. There are some indications that asthma, IBS, arthritis and MS symptoms can all be alleviated where the patients have been deliberately infected with different kinds of worms. The Wikipedia page here is a good overview, but New Scientist has a number of interesting articles on the subject. It seems that our fondness for hygiene, while generally a good thing, might have a number of deleterious side effects.

Onwards!

If you are not infected with worms, you might still want to seek out a male fern. According to folklore, it can make you invisible, a most useful attribute when trying to avoid your boss or indulge in some shady activity. Apparently anyone carrying it will be rendered imperceptible to the naked eye. I tried it with a few fronds plucked during the deluge but was still clearly visible (and wet). And then I read some more. Apparently, it’s the fern seeds that make you invisible. Ferns, as mentioned above, don’t have seeds. Therefore, if you find some they must be invisible and will ergo make you invisible too. Just like me not to read the small print. Plus, the seed was meant to be gathered on Midsummer’s Eve, along, it appears, with the rest of the plant (see below).

The root of the plant is known as ‘St John’s Hand’, and, if harvested and dried by a bonfire on Midsummer’s Eve is said to provide a powerful protection against any kind of misfortune, from ghosts and the evil eye to illness and bad luck. It’s said that Genghis Khan carried this charm on his person at all times, and it certainly worked for him. The trick is to tie five pieces of the root together in a hand shape, with the stem of the fern as the ‘wrist’. There’s a fine picture of one here.

If this were not enough, male fern can also be used in a potion to make a man fall in love.

During Victorian times there was a positive craze for ferns, as described by author  Dr Sarah Whittingham FSA in her book ‘Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania’. It may well have been triggered by Wordsworth et al, who waxed lyrical about ferns in The Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth is discussing the royal fern, Osmunda regalis, which grew in the Lake District.

‘Many such there are,
Fair Ferns and Flowers, and chiefly that tall Fern
So stately, of the Queen Osmunda named;
Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode,
On Grasmere’s beach, than Naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere,
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.’

I studied the Lyrical Ballads for my A-Levels back in 1978 and even that degree of immersion didn’t win me over to their charms – I still find them vaguely irritating (though I’m very happy to hear from you if you love them. I am not beyond convincing). But regardless of the cause, pteridomania led to a trend for fern patterns on wallpaper and porcelain, china and plaster. Native species were driven to the edge of extinction by Victorian collectors who were keen to imprison plants in their indoor glasshouses, called ‘Wardian Cases’. These were essential as the air pollution from coal fires would otherwise lead to the death of the plants.

These days, we have moved away from using ferns as indoor or garden plants, in spite of their great suitability for dark rooms, or those with humid atmospheres. But I am starting a one-woman drive to bring back the fern. In a north-facing garden, with two narrow, dark alleys, the ferns not only survive, but thrive. Their leaves offer a splendid green counterpoint on dark winter days. And if one day a two-foot long scorpion appears from under a frond, or a giant dragonfly flits past, I shall be delighted. I’m not called Bugwoman for nothing, y’know.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Croziers) – By Rror – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4072985

Photo Two (Male Fern) – By No machine-readable author provided. Valérie75 assumed (based on copyright claims). [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], 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!