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, when I was in Coldfall Wood last week I found this plant lurking by the Everglades, a winter pond where the water level is now nearly up to the boardwalk.

I must admit I was stumped. There is something a bit privet-like about it, but I had a feeling I’d seen the plant somewhere before.

And then I remembered. I’d seen it in supermarket car parks! A little research was in order and, with the aid of my botanist friends, I discovered that it was Box-Leaved Honeysuckle. It is being used in a lot of municipal planting to replace Box (Buxus sempervirens), as there is a lot of Box Blight about, a fungal disease which turns the leaves brown and leaves big bare patches. Members of the honeysuckle family are immune to Box Blight, and so have become very popular.

Of course, this doesn’t explain what my plant is doing, bang-smack in the middle of a wood.

We normally associate Honeysuckle with the golden-flowered climbing plant, spilling its scent into the warm summer air. But there are 180 species, of which over a hundred, including my plant, originated in China. Box-leaved Honeysuckle was brought to England in about 1900, and has been recorded ‘in the wild’ since about 1950. So this is a neophyte, a newbie, a brand new addition to our semi-wild flora.

‘If I were you, I’d dig it up’ said one of my botanical correspondents.

But here I have a problem. This is an urban wood, surrounded by gardens, allotments and a cemetery. If I start digging up all the plants that aren’t native, I will need a veritable army of minions with spades to help me. There’s the cherry laurel, the horse chestnuts (well, they’re Roman), the sycamores, the stray pyracantha and even, hidden away, a teeny-tiny monkey puzzle tree. Plus, it would be a battle against overwhelming odds, as new plants are ‘jumping over the fence’ all the time. Finally, with climate change, everything is up for grabs. Plants that used to thrive are likely to start having problems. Plants that used to struggle may seize their moment. Each will bring opportunities and challenges for the creatures that rely on them.

Box-leaved Honeysuckle has several things in its favour. It provides cover for a variety of birds and small mammals, and is planted as such for game birds in some parts of the country. No less than 347 species of butterflies and moths worldwide feed on the leaves of the different Honeysuckle species, and the berries are popular with all kinds of thrushes (which probably explains how my plant got to this spot in the wood). Am I going to reject this largesse on the grounds that the plant is in the wrong place?

It would be different, I think, if Coldfall Wood was that rarest of things, a pristine environment, or if Box-leaved Honeysuckle really presented some kind of threat to the ecology of the wood. But my guess is that it will enhance, rather than detract from, the biodiversity of the area. I look forward to seeing if it will flower, in spite of the deep shade, and if it will produce berries. It seems something of a free spirit, relaxing under a hornbeam tree instead of being blasted with diesel fumes in a supermarket car park. I find myself wishing it luck.

 

 

 

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, this week the search for a Wednesday Weed sent me in a completely different direction from my usual route. On a rainy, blustery day, I headed off towards our local primary school, to see if the playing fields there had anything growing that I had not already covered. In vain I peered through the fence at the turf, until my eyes refocused and I realised that I’d been looking at my subject all along. For what is more surprising on a January day than a plant that is already in full flower, ready to reproduce when everything else is still in bed?

The male Hazel catkin has the delightful colour of a sherbet-lemon. With every damp gust, invisible clouds of pollen are released. With any luck, they will be captured on by the red female flowers  who wait with open arms, a little like sea anemones.

It is these female flowers that will eventually turn into hazelnuts. They will promptly be nibbled off by squirrels or, if we are extremely lucky, by dormice. Kentish Cobnuts, with their creamy white interiors and little hats of pale green, are a domesticated variety of the hazelnut, but the wild variety is perfectly good to eat, and was, indeed, one of the staple foods of prehistoric peoples. Hazel has grown in the UK for at least the last 6000 years, and only birch was quicker to colonise the country after the last Ice Age. The spread of the plant throughout Europe has been attributed to its being carried from place to place by humans. After all, nuts are a concentrated, portable form of protein and carbohydrate. What better food if you’re embarking on a (very) long walk?

The Hazel growing beside the school playing fields has turned itself into a small tree, but historically it is much coppiced, the stems being used for a wide variety of purposes. They are extremely flexible, and can be turned back upon themselves or knotted. They were woven together to form both hurdles and fences, and were also used as the framework for wattle and daub walls. They are still used in thatching, to hold the thatch down, because the hazel stems can be bent through 180 degrees. A more modern use is in the creation of sound screens alongside motorways.

A plant which has lived alongside us in these islands since the very beginning, Hazel has many associations with Druid and Celtic beliefs. Its stems have been used for water divination, and for the making of shepherds’ crooks and pilgrims’ staffs. A Hazel tree was believed to be the home of Bile Ratha, the poetic fairy of Irish folklore, and it was believed that eating hazelnuts would bestow wisdom. On Dartmoor, Hazel was said to be the cure for snake and dog bites. And, to prevent toothache, you simply have to carry a double-hazelnut in your pocket at all times.

The catkins are shivering in the wintry blast, and so am I. Parents are tearing past me in their cars, hurrying to pick their children up from the school gate and giving me a decidedly funny look as I stand in the rain, peering through the fence with my camera.  I wonder if any of the children will get the chance to admire the catkins, the first sign that the long dark is finally loosening its grip. I hope that someone will take the time to show the little ones the ‘lambs tails’, and explain to them about this plant. After all, we have been living together, side by side, for six thousand years.

Happy New Year to all my readers – may 2015 bring you peace, health and inspiration, and may you encounter remarkable plants and animals to intrigue, delight and fascinate 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…..

I have always felt a little melancholy at New Year. Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert, and I no longer drink alcohol, both of which make me uneasy in situations of forced jollity and large crowds. Or maybe it’s because January feels more like a time for staying in bed, preferably with an excellent novel and a bowl of syrup pudding and custard, than a time for taking up jogging and eating kale. I feel a little out of step with the current need to be happy and shiny and full of vim on all occasions, and it’s difficult to escape a sneaking suspicion that I am some kind of alien as I watch the end-of-year shenanigans unfold.

So to give myself some perspective I went to see the oldest living thing in London with my long-suffering husband, John. This magnificent Yew tree lives in St Andrew’s churchyard in Totteridge, a twenty-minute bus ride from East Finchley. It has seen at least two thousand New Year’s days come and go, and is still full of fresh growth and vigor. To ensure its health, a team from Kew Gardens visited some thirty years ago and did a little judicious pruning and shoring up of the centre of the plant, which invariably becomes hollow as the plant ages.  The trunk is over twenty-six feet in circumference, and the wood is remarkable. In some places, it looks almost as if it is encrusted with sea creatures.

In others, there are little interstices which form homes for spiders and other invertebrates.

Yew is often found in churchyards. In some cases, it was deliberately planted to provide wood for longbows, but in this and many other cases, the tree long predates the church (there has been some kind of ecclesiastical building here since about 1250). It is very likely that the church was built on a site that was already sacred to the people of the area, and that the tree, then a stripling of just over a thousand years old, would have been locally important as a site for ritual and for meetings. Later, it was a site for the gathering of the Hundred, the medieval equivalent of the Magistrate’s court. In 1722, a baby was found under the tree, and was named ‘Henry Totteridge’ and made a ward of the parish.

Part of the reason for the longevity of Yew is that it is very slow-growing, and some scientists believe that the trees could reach ages of four to five thousand years. The Totteridge Yew is one of ten trees in the UK that date back to before the tenth century. Yew is very resistant to the fungal diseases which can cause the death of other trees by infecting the spot where a branch has dropped off. The tree can also regenerate from cut surfaces and from the base of the trunk even when it is of advanced years.

Yew has a long association with pagan rites and beliefs, perhaps because, like Holly, it is evergreen, long-lived and bears berries. The oldest wooden artifact ever found in Europe, a 450,000 year-old spearhead found in Clacton-on-Sea, is made of Yew.   All parts of the Yew are poisonous, except for the red flesh on the berry. A chief of the ancient Celtic tribe the Eburones (the ancient word for Yew was Eburos) killed himself by ingesting a toxin from the Yew tree rather than submitting to the Romans. It is known to be poisonous to horses, and the foliage, in hot weather, can produce a gas which is said to cause hallucinations. This same chemical, however, can be used to produce a drug for use in breast cancer, and for a while pharmaceutical companies were traveling the world, looking for substantial Yew forests to buy and destroy. What is new to science is often long-known by local peoples, however, and Yew has long been used by Himalayan people as a treatment for breast and ovarian cancer.

 

This is not the first time that Yew has been subject to a threat of over-harvesting. Its wood is perfect for the making of longbows, and in the fifteenth century compulsory longbow practice for all adult males was introduced. This depleted the supplies of these slow-growing trees so profoundly that Richard III introduced a ‘tax’, insisting that every ship bringing goods to England had to include ten bowstaves for every tun of goods. During the sixteenth century the supply of Yew dwindled to such an extent that there was none to be had in Bavaria or Austria. The habit of planting Yew trees in churchyards to ensure future demand may have begun during this time.

Yew trees have a dark, sombre aspect to them and yet, as one of our few native conifers, they provide some greenery when the other leaves have fallen. Their red berries provide a useful source of food for the birds, and I have often watched Goldcrests working their way through the needles with their needle-sharp bills, searching for any hibernating insects or badly-hidden cocoons. I shall be keeping my eyes and ears open in future for the high-pitched piping calls of these birds. Goldcrests are the smallest birds in the UK, with each one weighing less than a two-pence piece.

There is something about spending time outdoors that soothes the soul, and this is particularly true, I find, when I am in the company of a tree of such remarkable character as the Totteridge Yew. It has experienced so much in its long life that my mind is fairly boggled when I think about it. It was already a thousand years old when the Normans came with their stone masonry and castle-building and taste for wine. How many babies have been borne past it in their mother’s arms for Christening, how many young couples have passed under its branches on their wedding day, how many sombre coffins have been carried under the lych-gate to the freshly-dug graves that surround it? Once, people came up to the church on foot or in horse-drawn carts, where now they swoosh past in cars. If only it could tell me what it has seen. As I go, I rest my hand for a moment on that smooth, rose-pink bark, as I suspect so many have done before me. I feel a sense of calm descend, as if I have been holding my breath for a week, and have finally let it out.

Dear Readers, I am occasionally castigated by your good selves for designating a particular plant as a ‘weed’. People have been roused to fury by my inclusion of Feverfew and Yarrow, Holly and Ivy as ‘weeds’, and I understand how for many people (including me) these plants are helpmates and sources of wonder rather than problematic. You can imagine, then, how nervous I am about including that most venerable of plants, the Yew tree, as a ‘Wednesday Weed’, let alone the oldest Yew in London. However, my point is this: no plant is quintessentially a ‘weed’ – this is a purely human label. There is not a single plant that I have included in this series, from the fecund  Duckweed to this week’s remarkable conifer, that doesn’t have much to fascinate and amaze the keen observer. Our urge to classify the natural world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ is what got us into the mess that we’re currently in in the first place. We need to understand the connections between things, even the most commonplace of ‘weeds’, in order to make sensible decisions about everything from the plants in our gardens to the future of the planet. Every week, I learn more about my local environment, but I have also glimpsed the limitless depths that I have yet to understand.  This blog has made me humble, which I have grown to think is the only sensible reaction to the complexity and beauty of the natural world.

Happy Christmas/Winter Solstice/Hanukkah/Holidays to all my readers. Thank you for your comments, support and kindness this year. I look forward to finding many more ‘weeds’ and natural wonders for us to share in the year to come…..

‘Of all the trees that are in the wood, the Holly bears the crown’. Could there be a better plant than the noble Holly with which to celebrate Winter Solstice and Christmas? The Holly King is said to rule from Midwinter to Midsummer, carrying life through the winter in his leaves, until the Oak King takes over for the rest of the year. Right into the twentieth century, people would use small Holly trees as Christmas trees, rather than the fir trees that we use today, and most of us will still have some Holly in the house at this time of year, even if it’s only in the form of a plastic sprig on top of the Christmas pudding. In England, there is a tradition of growing it close to the house to protect those inside from evil spirits, whilst in Ireland it is grown away from the house so as not to disturb the fairies that live in it. It is also said to deter lightning, and so alcohol vendors would set up their stalls under Holly at markets, hence the large number of pub names that include a reference to Holly.

Holly is one of the few plants that survives deep in the uncoppiced parts of Coldfall Wood, where it is too dark for other vegetation to thrive. For thousands of years, many different species of Holly grew in a habitat known as the Laurel Forest, which was wet and dark, and which covered most of Europe. However, as the climate dried out only Ilex Aquifolium, the plant that we know as Holly, survived and prospered in the new Oak and Beech forests. Most of the Laurel Forests had died out by the end of the Pleistocene, ten thousand years ago.

The plant above was the first one that I’ve ever seen in flower, and led me to think about Holly reproduction. Although the plant is often associated in folklore with the male principle (as opposed to Ivy, which represents the female principle), the flowers can be either male or female. A female plant will need pollen from a male plant in order to produce the berries. What puzzles me a little is that the flowers are meant to be produced in May, when there are pollinators about, but my photograph was taken on the sixteenth of December. I suspect this is yet another sign of the confusion that climate change is creating in the natural world, much like the snowdrops that I saw in full bloom a few weeks ago, or the crocuses already flowering in a neighbour’s garden. Without bees to carry the pollen, these flowers are doomed to blush and fade, unconsummated. There is an old tradition of putting a sprig of Holly berries onto a beehive on Christmas Day to wish the bees ‘Merry Christmas’. Who would have dreamed that it would be equally possible to adorn it with a sprig of Holly flowers?

The berries contain three to four seeds, each of which takes two to three years to germinate. Holly is a plant which grows slowly – it doesn’t start to flower until it’s over four years old (sometimes as old as twelve), and an individual shrub can live to be five hundred years old. A mature Holly can be ten metres tall, but most are much smaller than this.

What a boon to wildlife Holly is! My parents have a mature Holly tree which is about six metres tall, and at the slightest sign of trouble all the local sparrows fly into it, turning it into a mass of chirping. The spines on the leaves require quite a lot of energy for the plant to produce, so, as it grows above the level of grazing creatures the leaves become smoother. Ironically, Holly was cultivated as fodder for cows and sheep until the eighteenth century, and the smoother leaves at the top of the tree were obviously preferred, so it seems as if there was no escape from being gobbled up.

There is an old tradition that if Holly foliage is brought into the house, both the ‘He-Holly’ (the prickly leaves) and the ‘She-Holly’ (the smooth leaves) must arrive at the same time, otherwise the partner whose leaves are brought in first will dominate for the rest of the year. There is also a tradition that bad luck will come down the chimney on Christmas Eve if the Holly is hung up before the Mistletoe (who presumably takes offence). I have a big box of Holly and Mistletoe in the shed, awaiting the arrival of my mother so that we can decorate together. Who knew that it was going to be such a complicated business? At least all the leaves and the two species will arrive together, so hopefully we’ll avoid upsetting anyone.

The ‘berries’ of the Holly (technically Drupes for my botanist friends) are very tough and bitter early on in the year. However, they are softened by the frosts, and become more palatable to the many birds and rodents that eat them, and by doing so help to spread the seeds through the forest. I put some Holly berries on the bird table, and they were gone by the following morning, so this might be a good use of any Holly decoration that is still in good condition by Twelfth Night.

Holly is one of the ‘original’ plants of the British Isles, with a history longer than that of human habitation here. It is no wonder that such a wealth of folklore and traditions have grown up around it. Its shiny, evergreen leaves and blood-red berries do seem to be holding the secret of life during these short, dark days, and it stands as protector and food-source to so many small birds and shy rodents. In winter-time, the Holly really is a kind of king.

For this post, I am grateful to the wonderful Poison Garden website, and to Plant Lives, another source of endless fascination. And I am eternally grateful to Richard Mabey for Flora Britannica, surely the most informative text on the folklore and traditions of British plants ever compiled.