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 wanted to feature the dog violet as a Wednesday Weed before it finishes flowering. There is a fine bed of it in the cemetery, stretching back between the trees for about 30 metres, and it gives the whole area a purple-blue haze.

Identifying violas to the species level is actually very difficult, but I have gone along with this being Common Dog Violet because, as its name suggests, it is our commonest species, and because several diagnostic features are right: for example, the ‘spur’ at the back of the flower is lighter than the petals in this species, and the lines on the lower petal, the ‘nectar guides’, are very pronounced. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there were thought to be over forty species and subspecies of violets, including many hybrids, but in his New Flora of the British Isles, the inimitable botanist Clive Stace has trimmed it back to twenty eight species, sub-species and hybrids.

What a delicate, pretty flower this is. Often it peeps out from below a hedgerow and if you weren’t paying attention it would be easy to miss it. It is a native plant, and has been a feature of our poetry for centuries. Perhaps the most famous mention of the violet is in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’:

‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight:
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.’

And I must admit that I felt tempted to have a little doze in the cemetery when I spotted the violets, the sun was so warm and the buzzing of bees so soporific. But artists have also identified something melancholy about the violet, maybe because of its perceived shyness, and its brief flowering period. My favourite Shakespeare violet quote is  from Hamlet, when Ophelia, driven mad by our hero, says to the assembled, horrified company that:

‘I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.’

Although I am not a great lover of Wordsworth’s poetry (too many weeks spent studying ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ for my A Levels I fear), I do find his poem ‘The Lost Love’ very moving. I think we can all identify with the final lines.

‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove:
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the eye!-
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!’

Many of the folkloric associations of the violet have to do with its assumed modesty. One of the goddess Diana’s nymph companions was changed into a violet to protect her from being ravished by Apollo. In the Victorian ‘language of flowers’ they represent delicacy in love. It is also said that violets bloomed wherever Orpheus put down his lute.

So, why ‘dog’ violet? It is thought that this is to distinguish this plant from the perfumed ‘sweet violet’ (Viola odorata), which I have not yet managed to find. It is this scented species which has been used in perfume-making since medieval times, and I well remember that when we used to holiday in Devon as children, every gift shop had a heady aroma of ‘Devon Violets’ perfume, which was inclined to give my mother a migraine. There were also violet-flavoured sweets, and a violet liquer (which was a violent violet colour) called ‘Parfait Amour’. These days, I limit myself to a box of rose and violet creme chocolates at Christmas, though I can scoff the lot in under an hour if left alone with them.

Many of the medicinal uses of violets relate to the Sweet Violet, but according to The Modern Herbal website, Culpeper refers to the leaves of all species as being useful in a poultice for inflammation, and to relieve ‘pains in the head through lack of sleep’. An infusion of the flowers and leaves is said to assist with the symptoms of throat complaints, including cancer.  The root is said to be extremely emetic and purgative. Mixing thirty-six violet leaves with melted lard is said to produce an ointment which can be used for swollen neck glands.

If violets are to be used for flavouring then Sweet Violet will be used, but the flowers of Common Dog Violet can be used to pretty-up salads, or, crystallised with egg white and sugar, to adorn cakes. I’m not sure if the cake below quite sums up the delicate effects that I’m sure can be achieved but hey, I’d eat it.

As we might expect, the violet has also been part of the work of many artists. It is included in the garden of ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ tapestry, made in Flanders in the sixteenth century. Here, it is symbolising modesty, as usual.

By the time of Manet, it was being used for its colour and form rather than for its symbolic value. In the picture below, I love the juxtaposition of the flowers against the red fan, and the lavender-edged writing paper. I also enjoy the way that the flowers are seen here against the darkness. I remember that Napoleon scattered Josephine’s coffin with the flowers of violets.

And, to link back to the association of violets with death and sorrow, have a look at this Magritte picture, titled ‘La Grande Guerre’ (‘The Great War’), from the Magritte Gallery The face of the woman is replaced by a posy of violets, such as one might throw onto a coffin.

How intent we are on attaching symbolic value to flowers, which are actually the fierce face of a plant’s determination to reproduce itself. And how interesting that a violet can be a symbol of melancholy, of modesty, and of the dreaminess of a summer evening, all at the same time.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Lsalvay – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25641207

All other photographs copyright Vivienne Palmer

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, every so often a plant that I haven’t noticed before seems to be popping up absolutely everywhere, and this is the case with three-cornered garlic (also known as three-cornered leek). I first noticed it in the cemetery, where it was growing happily on the graves alongside the artificial roses, but then I saw it popping up along the edge of a wall by All Saints’ Church, and growing in some of the gardens in the County Roads here in East Finchley. It’s easy to miss because it looks rather like a white bluebell, but the giveaway is the stem, which is sharply triangular, like a long green Toblerone bar. The leaves have a faint but unmistakable onion/garlic flavour, as you would expect from an allium and if you turn them over, they have a deep ridge in the centre, which some people compare to the keel of a ship. Finally, the flowers have a fine green stripe, which is another indicator for the species.

Three-cornered garlic was introduced from the Mediterranean basin by 1759, and has been naturalising ever since, especially in the south-west. It is described in many places as ‘invasive’, and certainly it appears to take off like a rocket when in the right position. But it has numerous good qualities.  As you might expect of a plant with a garlicky taste, it can be used for a wide variety of culinary purposes . On his ‘Eat The Weeds’ website, Robin Harford has a recipe for Wild Greens with Spiced Tahini Rice, which includes not only three-cornered garlic but also ground elder and herb bennet, both of which can be a right royal pain in the backside if they get a grip in the garden. If this doesn’t appeal, you can knock up some Three-cornered Garlic Hummus. And finally (and this would be perfect because the Lady’s Smock (Cardamine pratensis) is just coming into flower in the cemetery), you could make Lady’s Smock and Three-cornered Garlic Salad. Robin is of the opinion that the plant is the closest wild equivalent to Chinese Chives, which can be expensive and difficult to obtain,  so three-cornered garlic is a very handy free substitute.

I also think the pretty flowers would make a lovely addition to a leafy spring salad.

I find it a little bit amusing that this ‘invasive weed’ is one of the plants featured on the Borough Market website. Borough Market is a high-end food market close to London Bridge station, which sells all manner of delicacies, from native oysters to wild mushrooms. You can read a few more recipe suggestions here  but I suspect that it would be a lot cheaper to knock up some three-cornered garlic pesto yourself if you have any growing nearby. Certainly one way to cope with plants which outgrow their welcome is to turn them into lunch. However, should you have a pet tortoise, this is one of the plants that the Tortoise Table website recommends that you don’t feed to your reptile, on the basis that plants that grow from bulbs are not suitable fodder. Plus, who wants a shelled companion with onion breath? Though I suppose it would be easy enough to run away.

But enough of this silliness. From a medicinal point of view, three-cornered garlic is believed to have the same attributes as other alliums (the sulphur compounds which give onions and garlic their flavour are thought to act as a liver and blood tonic), though to a lesser extent. Interestingly, if there is (unusually) no sulphur in the soil, all allium species lose their flavour. The juice is said to act as a moth repellent, though I suspect that the onion scent might act as a person deterrent too. Furthermore, the whole plant is said to repel insects and moles. Personally, I would love to have a visit from a mole, but then I don’t have a lawn to worry about.

Three-cornered garlic has taught me a very valuable lesson. I had walked past the little stand of flowers above and completely ignored them because I thought they were white bluebells, or Loddon Lily. In a way, i was stereotyping them: ‘white bell-like flowers, long leaves, must be something I already know’. If I had stopped to really get to know them, to look at the stem and the leaves, and, most of all, to give them a sniff, I would have known that this was something different. As in all things, I need to pay attention to what’s in front of me, rather than just sticking it in a category and forgetting about it. The world is much more subtle and varied, more diverse, than I ever realised.

 

 

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 am sure that when you were children many of you, like me, will have picked a buttercup and held it under your chin to see if you ‘liked butter’, a most nonsensical way to carry on but an experience which, in these parts at least, seems to be almost universal. However, you would have difficulty performing the exercise with this buttercup, which I noticed in the cemetery last week. Although it has the leaves of a buttercup, and although the buds look familiar, the flowers are very strange. The petals look somehow stunted, as if they’ve been nibbled off by a famished caterpillar. And yet, it appears, this is a characteristic of the Goldilocks buttercup (Ranunculus auricomus), a plant in which almost every flower is deformed.

Why ‘Goldilocks’, I wondered? Well, the species name auricomus literally means ‘golden-hair’, so maybe the English name is an exact transliteration. Or, as someone suggested, maybe its woodland habitat put people in mind of the fairy story. Whatever the reason, it is a strange and delicate plant, all stem and stamen.

This species loves chalk (technically, it is a calcicole, another new word!) I was therefore surprised to find it growing in the heavy clay of the cemetery. However, every patch that I’ve found has appeared directly on top of a grave, so maybe something in the planting medium is subtly different, enabling the buttercup to thrive.

The Goldilocks buttercup reproduces asexually (known as apomixis) – it sets seed without need for cross-pollination, and every new plant is a clone of the parent. This means that there can be unique local populations, known as agamospecies, and several hundred of these have been identified in mainland Europe, though, as far as I know, no one has looked into the situation in the UK yet. Our growing expertise with genetic analysis has opened a whole can of worms with regard to plants. Once, a dandelion was a dandelion, but now there are known to be 40 endemic microspecies in the UK alone. It seems that no sooner do we clear up one mystery than hundreds more present themselves. Still, what an exciting time to be a geneticist!

The Goldilocks buttercup is native to the UK, and has a range that extends from Greenland (where it is sometimes found growing in the damp places beside waterfalls) right the way through northern Europe and Russia, and then into Alaska and the Western US. For this reason, the plant is sometimes known as the Greenland buttercup. However, it is slow to spread locally, and is seen as an indicator of ancient woodland. Were these buttercups growing in the woods that pre-date the cemetery, I wonder?

I wonder, too, about those deformed and missing petals. As the plant reproduces asexually, maybe the need to attract insects for pollination is not as strong as in other buttercups. Could it also be because, as each plant is a clone, any damaging genes will perpetuate themselves? In his book ‘Vegetable Teratology’, Maxwell T. Masters mentions that in damp woodland settings, the Goldilocks buttercup tends to have small, distorted petals and luxuriant leaf growth, but in more arid sites the petals are more complete, the leaves smaller. It’s almost as if the plant has a ‘growth budget’, which it expends according to the situation in which it finds itself. At any rate, the lack of petals doesn’t seem to have done these plants any harm, as they were growing in some numbers in the shade of the old hornbeams, surrounded by their close relatives the Lesser Celandines (Ranunculus ficaria).

What an unusual plant this is! I am used to seeing flora with all manner of galls and discolourations, their leaves nibbled and mined by their insect hosts (as are some of the leaves in the photograph below). I am familiar with the range of colours that can occur within even a small population of the same plant. And yet, I have never come across one before with distorted or absent petals through no obvious external cause. It just goes to show that nature is full of surprises.

All photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

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, snake’s head fritillary is my favourite spring bulb. I am exceedingly fond of snakes, and so the strange scaly pattern on the purple flowers enthralls me. I love the elegance of the pure white flowers. I love the nodding heads, which only reveal their beauty if you turn them over.

However, it’s fair to say that the plant has an unfortunate reputation. One alternative name was ‘Leper Lily’, as the flowers are said to be the same shape as the bells that lepers had to carry to announce themselves. Vita Sackville-West called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay.’  As with many other flowers of a nodding habit, they were said to be hanging their heads in sorrow at Christ’s crucifixion.

Well, harrumph to all that. The fritillary family contains the only truly chequered flowers that I know (but do remind me of others if you can think of them!) Both parts of the Latin name for snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris) refer to this feature: the Fritillaria part refers to either the Latin word for dice (fritillus) or (more likely to my mind) the word frittillo, which means a table for chess-playing (thanks to The Poison Garden website for this insight). This is also the root derivation for the name of the fritillary group of butterflies.

The meleagris species name means ‘spotted like a guineafowl’.

According to my Harraps Wild Flowers book, snake’s head fritillary were first recorded in the UK in 1578 (they are native to mainland Europe and Asia), but were not reported in the wild until 1736. However, there is a view that the plants are actually native, growing originally on the floodplains that extended from the Rhine and included the Thames before the opening up of the North Sea in about 5500 BC. They are now a plant of unimproved meadow which occasionally floods, a vanishingly rare habitat, and are considered to be Nationally Scarce. Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, mentions a few sites where the plants can be seen in quantity, including North Meadow in Cricklade,Wiltshire. He describes this meadow thus:

North Meadow (now a National Nature Reserve) is an ancient common, and what is known as Lammas Land. Its 44 acres are shut up for hay on 13 February each year until the hay harvest (apportioned by lot) some time in July. On old Lammas Day, 12 August, it become the common pasture of the Borough of Cricklade, and any resident of the town may put up to ten head of horses or cattle on it, or (after 12 September) 20 head of sheep. As far as is known, this system of land tenure has continued unchanged for more than 800 years, and the show at North Meadow may be the best evidence that the fritillary is a native species.’

Whatever their provenance, snake’s head fritillaries are certainly widely naturalised in many places, such as here in St Pancras and Islington cemetery, where they are outgrowing their original planting site and heading off in to the woods. I have some in my garden as well, where they don’t seem to mind the clay soil and the shade.

Although the snake’s head fritillary is such an exotic and enigmatic plant, it appears not to have been used medicinally – maybe its association with lepers was too strong for it to be considered useful. It is also poisonous, though there are no accounts of anybody tucking into a bulb and doing themselves a damage as there are with daffodils.  However, the plant is celebrated as the County Plant of Oxfordshire (due to Magdalen College Meadow being an important snake’s head fritillary site), and also as the provincial plant of Uppland in Sweden. And furthermore, it is also celebrated by me. This most curious plant cheers me up whenever I look at it, in much the same way as I am delighted when a new house spider turns up or when I discover an unexpected caterpillar in the lettuce. I find its snakiness a refreshing change from all the wholesome bulbs that are bursting forth at this time of year, and it reminds me that something (or somebody) doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Bob – Picasa Web Albums, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12365512

Photo Two – By James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1680620

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer

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 my way through Coldfall Wood last week, my eye was caught by a group of bright magenta flowers growing beside the stream. When I slithered across the mud to investigate, I was delighted to find a little group of honesty (Lunaria annua) in full flower.  This is another of those plants that has probably escaped, either from the local gardens or from the cemetery, but it has been recorded in the wild since at least 1597 so it is a long-term inhabitant. Its native home is the Balkans and parts of south-west Asia.

Who would have thought that this pretty plant is a member of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae)? And yet a close look at its flowers give us a clue. All members of this varied tribe have simple flowers with four petals and four sepals, and the cross-like arrangement is what gives the group its alternative name of crucifer.

Honesty is probably more familiar from its seed-pods, whose semi-transparent nature are said to give it its English name. These are very popular in autumn flower arrangements, and also give the plant many of its alternative names: in south-east Asia it’s known as ‘the money plant’ and in the US it is known as ‘silver money’ or ‘chinese money’. In Dutch-speaking countries, however, the plant is known as judaspenning (coins of Judas), an allusion to the thirty pieces of silver Judas was given for betraying Christ. It is fascinating to me how a plant may have a reputation for plain dealing in one culture, and be seen as treacherous in another. Even in the UK, the Plant Lore website reports that in Yorkshire, some people believe that the plant is very unlucky, and won’t have it in the garden or the house, while in Kent it’s known as ‘the devil’s ha’pence’. On the other hand, the Magickal Gardening website reports that keeping one of the ‘coins’ in the pocket will attract good fortune.  I suppose that a plant with such evocative seedpods was going to attract all kinds of beliefs.

In her book ‘Fifty Easy Old-Fashioned Flowers’, Anne M. Zeman tells us that honesty has been used to dress wounds, and as a cure for epilepsy. She also tells us that the roots have been used in salads since the 1500’s. Furthermore, other sources describe how the seeds can be turned into a kind of mustard if mixed with vinegar – this is not surprising when we consider that the cabbage family contains many other plants with this property, including Black and Hoary Mustard.

Honesty, and in particular its seedpods, were very popular in the Art Nouveau movement, as in the illustration by Alfonso Mucha below (part of his 1900 precious stones series).

The Precious Stones series includes Ruby (which features of all things a poinsettia), Amethyst (with some irises) and Emerald (with Tradescantia). Mucha was such a favourite in our house when I was growing up that we had his ‘Moon and Stars’ series framed in the hallway. I have always liked his graceful female figures, and the way that he included plants and other elements of the natural world, even in his posters for theatrical productions and such necessities as Moet et Chandon champagne. If you are ever in Prague, I can recommend a visit to the Mucha museum. Although his paintings are a little too fey for many people’s taste in this more cynical age, I think that there is always room for a celebration of lush beauty and the abundance of nature. In this age of austerity, it’s easy to forget how much there is to be grateful for.

Photo Credits

Photo One – By Christian Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1159063

Photo Two – Via Swallowtail Garden Seed https://www.flickr.com/photos/swallowtailgardenseeds/14985632221

All other photos copyright Vivienne Palmer