Mexican Hawthorn (Crataegus mexicana) Photo by Tony Rudd at https://www.flickr.com/photos/tony_rodd/4887236725/

Dear Readers, we may not think of hawthorn as a Christmas plant here in the UK, but there are at least two reasons that we shouldn’t discount it. First up, the Mexican hawthorn (Crataegus mexicana) is turned into what looks like a rather delicious hot punch, or ponche, in Mexico: the plant is known as manzanita (little apple) in Spanish, or tejocote, which means ‘stone fruit’. The ponche also includes sugar cane, cloves, hibiscus, star anise, raisins and prunes, so you could  easily get a substantial number of your 5 fruit and veg a day. Did I ever tell you that when I mentioned this concept to my Mum, she asked if she could count lemon meringue pie, because it had lemons in it?

Ponche on sale in Mexico

Ponche is on sale at Christmas time, and on New Year’s Eve. For the Day of the Dead, the fruit of the Mexican hawthorn and candies made from the fruit are offered, and rosaries made from the fruit are part of the grave decorations. Candies called rielitos (because it looks like a tiny train track) is made from Mexican hawthorn fruit, sugar and chilli powder (though on further investigation I find that the commercial sweets are made with tamarind instead).

Homemade rielitos from https://cocinerosmxporelmundo.com/rielitos/

However! You do not have to go all the way to Mexico to find a link between hawthorn and Christmas. In Glastonbury there are hawthorns that come into flower at Christmas and then again in the spring: they are thought to be common hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna) but of the biflora subspecies, which means that they flower twice. This habit of springing into flower in the middle of winter has a long association with Joseph of Arimathea, a saint who was believed to have visited the West Country – in some tellings of the legend, he brought the young Jesus with him. In Cornwall, it’s believed that Joseph was originally a tin merchant, who came to Cornwall because it was a centre of the tin trade at that point. The legend of the Glastonbury Thorn, however, told that Joseph, bearing the Holy Grail and exhausted from his travels, leaned on his staff on Wearyall Hill outside Glastonbury, and the wood miraculously put down roots and burst into flower. This original tree was destroyed by Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War, but many trees had been propagated from it (including one that was on Wearyall Hill until it was vandalised in 2010).

Joseph of Arimathea was the subject of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.  It seems to have become a popular song at funerals, weddings, sporting events, the Last Night of the Proms, and at political rallies for the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Party. It has been voted as ‘England’s National Anthem’ on several occasions. And yet this is a strange and mystical piece, as so many of Blake’s poems are. When belted out at high volume it certainly rouses the spirits, but what is actually going on is far from clear. Don’t get me wrong, I love Blake with a passion, but it sometimes feels as if this is a song that can be weaponised to support almost any view of what England’s ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ can be.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

Anyhow, back to the Glastonbury Thorn! Some of the trees growing in the grounds of St John’s Church preserve the original double flowering, and every Christmas, children from St John’s Infant School gather around a tree in flower. They sing carols, and the oldest child cuts a flowering twig that is sent to the monarch in London.

Glastonbury Thorn in St John’s churchyard (Photo By michael ely, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13994476)

Incidentally, the variety of hawthorn that flowers twice probably comes originally from the Middle East, which is where Joseph of Arimathea would have travelled from. Coincidence? We’ll never know the full story of the Glastonbury Thorn, for sure, but we could all do with a few more miracles, and a magically regenerating tree from someone’s walking stick does it for me. Just imagine if all of our furniture decided that ‘enough’s enough’ and became oak trees and willows and pine forests again?

Roast Chestnuts (Photo by By Peter Forster – Flickr: Caldarroste, geroestete Kastanien, roasted Chestnuts, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13139709)

Dear Readers, I have managed to get myself confused with which day I was writing about (too much sherry in the trifle I reckon), so I managed to do two posts for the Sixth Day of Christmas. After a bit of messing about (technical term) calm is now restored: today is Day Ten, so two more to go! And apologies for any head-scratching, though hopefully nobody has noticed except me. 

Dear Readers, I only have to hear the first few bars of ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire’ to find myself in the Christmas mood, though it has to be the Nat King Cole version. I just love the phrasing on this song, hopelessly sentimental as it is. And it immediately takes me back to my youth, when there were chestnut sellers at either end of Hungerford Bridge, which crosses the Thames at Embankment station. This was not the nice new high-faluting bridge that we’ve had for the past few decades, but the narrow scary one with the trains rattling up the middle. Ah youth.

I must have crossed this bridge a hundred times on my way to and from the National Theatre. When I was a student back in the 1970s and 80s, you could queue up for cheap tickets to see more or less anything, and so we did go to see more or less everything that was on. Stand out performances for me included a theatrical version of the Vietnam War book ‘Dispatches’ – performed in the little Cottosloe theatre, it was a terrifying experience. Every time one of the actors raised his gun the whole front row ducked. Yikes. I saw the first run of ‘Angels in America’ here too. It occurs to me that now that I’m retired I could be sneaking off to get cheap tickets again. Hooray!

Photo of Hungerford Bridge as was from A London Inheritance

Incidentally, the photo above is from the ever-excellent ‘A London Inheritance‘ blog, which is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the Capital – what a wealth of information this blog contains! Highly recommended.

And now, let’s have a little think about the sweet chestnut, a magnificent tree with many gifts of foliage, fruit and flower. Don’t miss the poem at the end of this Wednesday Weed post, from 2021.

Sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa)

Dear Readers, I confess a great liking for the sweet chestnut tree. It was introduced to the UK by the Romans, who loved its sweet, mealy fruit, and grew it not only for this purpose but also for its timber and perceived medicinal benefits (its Latin name sativa means ‘cultivated by humans’). I love it for its furry fruits, and for those shiny serrated green leaves. The tree can live for several thousand years, and can reach a height of 35 metres.

Sweet chestnut is not closely related to horse chestnut, although the fruits do resemble conkers – sweet chestnuts are members of the Beech family (Fagaceae), while horse chestnuts and buckeyes belong to the soapberry and lychee family Sapindaceae. It just goes to show that superficial differences, such as the ‘hairy’ nut cases and the leaves which spray out like fingers from a central point, do not indicate an actual family relationship.

The bark has a characteristic spiral pattern, which I noted on another sweet chestnut that I saw on Hampstead Heath, and the flowers are in long sprays that are said to smell strongly of frying mushrooms.

Spiral bark on the Hampstead Heath sweet chestnut

Sweet chestnut flowers (Photo One)

Incidentally, the sweet chestnut catkins bear both male and female parts, with the female flowers at the bottom and the male flowers at the top. It’s the female flowers that will turn into chestnuts if pollinated. The tree is self-incompatible, which means that it can’t fertilise itself – the tree somehow recognises that the pollen grain from the male part of the plant is of the same genetic make-up as that of the stigma (female organ) of the receiving plant, and stops the process of fertilization. This prevents inbreeding, and is considered one of the most important mechanisms for ensuring the genetic diversity and health of a population. Who knew? Certainly not me. I am astonished pretty much every day.

Now, back to the sweet chestnut fruit itself. This is the quintessential chestnut that you smell cooking on braziers all over London at Christmas time, and very tasty the nuts are too. Apparently Roman soldiers were given chestnut porridge before going into battle, and look how successful they were! The French have a particular fondness for chestnuts (marrons) – they turn up as sweets (marrons glacé) and in Mont Blanc, a dish made from chestnut puree fashioned into vermicelli with whipped cream. Italy and Switzerland both claim the Mont Blanc as ‘their’ dessert, in much the same way that hummous is claimed by at least eight different Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern countries. I think that travelling the countries involved and sampling the dish in each region could easily be turned into a gastronomic travel book and if anyone wants to offer me a book deal to do such a thing I am open to offers once the pandemic is over.

French/Italian/Swiss/ Mont Blanc (Photo Two)

I thought that marrons glacé were  indisputably French, but apparently Northern Italy, a major sweet chestnut-growing region, also claims them.

Marrons glacés (Photo Three)

Furthermore, in Corsica polenta (or pulenta as it’s called) is made from chestnut flour, and the Corsicans also make sweet chestnut beer. Chestnut flour has no gluten, and so is useful for people suffering from coeliac disease.

Corsican chestnut beer (Photo Four)

Historically, sweet chestnut has also been used for timber – like other trees in the Beech family, such as hornbeam, it responds well to coppicing, and produces a good crop every 12 to 30 years. In his book ‘Woodlands’, Oliver Rackham describes how there are possible remnants of Roman chestnut orchards on the edge of the Forest of Dean, but it seems that in the UK chestnut timber was relegated to uses such as hop poles and included in the wattle-and-daub walls of medieval houses. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, if not coppiced these trees can reach an immense size and age. One ancient sweet tree in South Gloucestershire, the Tortworth Chestnut, was called ‘the old Chestnut of Tortworth’ in records from 1150 AD, indicating that it’s over a thousand years old.

The Tortworth Sweet Chestnut (Photo Five)

Medicinally, it’s the leaves of the sweet chestnut that have been used, in particular to cure whooping cough and other ‘irritable and excitable conditions of the respiratory organs’. The belief in the efficacy of the leaves as a treatment for coughs lasted until at least the Second World War, according to the Plant Lore website. Another use for the leaves, also recorded on Plant Lore, was by children playing at running a home – if you strip away the flesh from the leaves they apparently look exactly like fish bones, just the thing for dinner!

And finally, a poem. This is by Thomas James, who was born in 1946 and committed suicide in 1974, a year after this poem was written. I’ve read it over and over, and I see more with every reading, but it still refuses to be nailed down, which is, I think, how it should be with a poem. See what you think, readers.

“The Chestnut Branch” by Thomas James

There is something to be said for darkness
After all. My mother’s hands
Have been full of the dark all winter.

They are hollow boats not going anyplace.
They only pull the blinds
Or gesticulate at some ineradicable star.

Now the backyard unfolds its lacy pleats,
And I bring in a white branch
Because love is the lesson for tomorrow.

Will nothing cure the brightness in these streets?
A million strange petals touch
The panes. Is it a gift of snow?

Is it making up for lack of bandages?
Is it cold, is it hot–
Will it keep, should we put it on ice?

Should my sister sew it into bridal clothes?
Is it lingerie, or just a sheet
To pull across a used-up face?

Will it brighten up the arms of chairs?
It moves. It hurts my eyes.
I am not accustomed to so much light.

It is like waking after twenty years
To find your wife gone and the trees
Too big, strange white growths that flank the street.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Viascos, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two By Honio – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8630026

Photo Three By "passamanerie" / flaviab – https://www.flickr.com/photos/flaviab/2013678423/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4884657

Photo Four By Clément Bucco-Lechat – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22857997

Photo Five By Aliasnamesake – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107161562

Opened pomegranate (Photo By Ivar Leidus – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98253540)

Dear Readers, you might not associate the pomegranate with Christmas, but it’s very much part of the Christmas rituals of Greece. Pomegranates are hung above the main entrance to the house (often after being blessed in church). On New Year’s Eve, all the family leave the house during the twelve chimes at midnight, symbolising the end of the old year. Then the first-footer enters (right foot first), and the second person takes the pomegranate and smashes it against the front door. The number of seeds spattered indicates how much luck the family will have during the year to come, and it’s especially good luck if you’re personally spattered with pomegranate juice.

Although I know that New Year is just an arbitrary date (much more so than those with an actual astronomical date, such as the solstices or the equinoxes) I find myself repeating the rituals of my childhood. When Big Ben starts to chime, I have to open the back door to let the old year out. Then, before the chimes stop I have to open the front door to let the new year in, and close the back door (I assume that otherwise the year would whistle through the house and we’d spend the year in limbo). In the East End everyone would then bang the tin dustbin lids with ladles or spoons or whatever else came to hand, but it’s not so much fun with wheelie bins. These days, I am often the only person on the front step, desperately looking for someone to wish ‘Happy New Year’ to. So I’m wishing it to all you lovely readers – may 2024 bring you health and happiness, and may there be less of the misery and suffering that so many people have endured in 2023.

And now, let’s have a look at that most exotic and strange of fruit, the pomegranate. This is from my Wednesday Weed of 2021.

Dear Readers, I never know what’s going to turn up in the organic fruit and vegetable box that I get once a fortnight, so finding a pair of pomegranates this week was a real treat! They are a strange fruit in lots of ways: the only edible bit is around the seeds, so they’re quite a lot of work. I remember my Mum saying that when she was a little girl, a pomegranate was such a treat that she’d sit curled up in the armchair for hours, winkling out the seeds one at a time with a pin. She was born in 1935 so I imagine this would have been just after the war, and surely such a fruit would have been an extraordinary luxury.

I remember Dad saying that he was given a banana by Princess Elizabeth as she was then when she visited the East End. It looks as if she spent a lot of the post-WWII period doling out bananas, and in this story, someone actually gives some back. Dad maintained that they ate them with the skins on because they didn’t know any different, though he was always one for embroidering a story if he thought it would make you laugh. It makes me even more determined to eat the ones that are gradually darkening in my fruit bowl. And, in case you missed it, Nigella Lawson even found a use for the banana skins in her recent TV series, to the bafflement of many. I’m sure my Mum would have thought it was a good idea.

But anyway, back to the pomegranate. To my surprise, it’s a member of the Loosestrife family, Lythraceae, which gave us such stars as purple loosestrife. The name ‘pomegranate’ came from medieval Latin, and means ‘seeded apple’. The Latin species name, Punica granatum, led to the idea that the fruit originally came from the city of Granada in Spain, and also led to the name ‘grenadine’ for the pink syrup that was a trendy mixer back in the days when I was a gal (hence ‘pink gin’).

The shrub can grow up to 33 feet tall, but also can be turned into a Bonsai. I’d never seen pomegranate flowers, so here they are!

Pomegranate flower (Photo One)

Even more excitingly, for me anyway, the word ‘grenade’ comes from the appearance of the fruit, and you can see why. Light the bit on the top and you’re away.

Actually, though, pomegranate comes originally from an area from modern-day Iran through to north-western India, though it has been cultivated throughout the Mediterranean region for centuries, and has been farmed in Arizona and California. Thomas Jefferson had a pomegranate tree in his garden at Monticello in 1771, and the earlier settlers in the south managed to get some fruit from the tree. I suspect that it has always been a luxury: the fruit was found in the  Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck, off the coast of Turkey, alongside perfume, ivory and gold jewellery, and where it is found in tombs these are usually of high-status individuals.

Pomegranates growing on a tree in Casa D’Oro, Venice

Pomegranates are having something of a resurgence at the moment, along with a rise in interest in ‘Middle Eastern’ food. In particular, I find myself falling over recipes that feature pomegranate molasses, and I can see why – it has an interesting sweet/sour taste that is more interesting than a lot of sugary ingredients. I have even had a drizzle over my porridge and yoghurt in the morning, which is the height of decadence! But those jewel-like seeds look so pretty scattered over savoury dishes that I can see why they’re a hit, and they also add an interesting crunch.

In Iran, pomegranates and walnuts are used, along with other ingredients, to make a fesenjãn, a kind of chicken stew flavoured with spices such as turmeric, rose, cinnamon and cardamom. Delicious!

Chicken and aubergine fesenjan (Photo Two)

The pomegranate has also been embraced by Mexicans, and it features in Chiles en nogada, a dish in which the green of chilli, the white of the cream sauce and the red of the pomegranate seeds represents the Mexican flag. It is often eaten during the Mexican Independence celebrations of August and September. In the photo below it looks as if parsley has been used to provide the green colour, although the dish itself is supposed to feature green stuffed chillis. Go figure.

Chile en nogada (Photo Three)

As you might expect for a fruit that’s been part of human culture for so long, there is a whole raft of folklore and mythology around the plant. In Greek legend, the pomegranate was thought to have sprung from the blood of Adonis, and Persephone’s consumption of the seeds while she was in Hades dictated how many months she had to spend underground. Even in modern Greece the pomegranate features in folklore: it is good luck to to be given a pomegranate as a gift when you move into a new house, and the dish kollyva which is brought as an offering to the dead contains wheat boiled with sugar and decorated with pomegranate seeds.

In Judaism, the pomegranate is one of the Seven Species, fruits and vegetables mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as part of the special products of the Land of Israel. It’s traditional to consume pomegranates at Rosh Hashanah because they are symbols of fertility, and this seems to be general: in countries from Azerbaijan to Armenia, China to India, the pomegranate means fruitfulness. In Armenia, which has a long association with the fruit, a bride traditionally smashes a pomegranate against the wall, with the scattered seeds ensuring that the marriage will be blessed with children.

Pomegranate statue in Yerevan, Armenia (Photo Four)

Many Jewish scholars (and some Christian ones) believe that the fruit in the Garden of Eden was a pomegranate, not an apple. In Christian iconography, the split fruit represents Christ’s suffering and death, and this is prefigured in Botticelli’s ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate (1487).

Detail from Botticelli’s ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’ (circa 1487) (Photo Five)

And now, a poem.In fact, two poems.  Eavan Boland died in April last year. She is one of Ireland’s most important poets, and yet I hadn’t come across her before. There is so much to learn in our short lives. Below, I’ve included two of her poems. Pomegranate, because of today’s theme – it might help to know that Boland moved with her family to London in 1950, and had her first experience of the anti-Irish sentiment that was rife. The second poem, Quarantine, is one of those poems that makes everything stop for a moment. See what you think.

The Pomegranate
Eavan Boland – 1944-2020

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

Quarantine
Eavan Boland – 1944-2020

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Photo Credits

Photo One By Sanu N – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70975838

Photo Two by By stringparts – originally posted to Flickr as Fesenjan, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9971172

Photo Three  By Jessica Toledo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37857302

Photo Four By Tatevhovikyan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94336234

Photo Five  By Sandro Botticelli – Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=912727

Photo Six  By Uwe Barghaan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4107571

Poinsettia – Photo by Tony Hisgett from Birmingham,

Dear Readers, there have been lots of posts on social media this year of sad-looking poinsettias gradually dying outside supermarkets across the land. I often wonder about these plants – they’re sold so cheaply, and I suspect that the overworked supermarket staff have no time to water them or keep an eye on them. Poinsettias, being particularly choosy plants, often suffer the most – over water them and their leaves drop off and they turn soft and mushy, but if you don’t water them at all the leaves also drop off and the whole plant dries up to twigs. Alas! To be honest this is not a plant that does well with benign neglect, and, as with puppies and kittens, Christmas is probably the worst time to bring a new pot plant home unless it really can take care of itself (like an Amaryllis for example). Read on for how to help your poor beleaguered poinsettia to survive from year to year, and how it became so associated with Christmas.

Dear Readers, I can scarcely believe that I haven’t done a post on poinsettia before, but here it is, in all its Christmassy glory. Who would have thought that this plant is actually a Euphorbia? In the wild, it lives in Mexico and Central America, and is named after Joel Poinsett, the first United States Minister to Mexico. Poinsettia grow to the size of a small tree if left unmolested, but most of them live their lives in a pot as a temporary house plant, being thrown in the bin at the end of the Christmas period as they lose their leaves and start to look extremely sad. It doesn’t have to be this way, though! Read on!

As you probably know, the red ‘flowers’ are actually leaves, or bracts, with the actual flowers being the little yellow and green blobs in the middle. They have been cultivated to appear in a variety of other colours, including cerise,  white and salmon. However, pretty as they are, cultivated poinsettias are diseased, according to Clare Wilson at New Scientist – to make short, bushy plants, growers infect poinsettias with a bacteria that causes them to grow lots more side shoots that terminate in those colourful bracts.

Poinsettia varieties (Photo By Andy Mabbett )

If you are lucky enough to receive a poinsettia at Christmas, the advice is not to overwater it – wait until the plant’s leaves are just starting to droop, and then put them in to a bowl of water for about an hour. The plant should also be kept at a fairly stable temperature (i.e. not next to a window where they’ll be cold overnight) – Wilson’s article mentions that the plants don’t need high light levels for the month or two that they’ll be on display, so they can be positioned well away from a window.

But are poinsettias poisonous? There was an urban legend in the 1920s that a child had died after ingesting a leaf, but this was later found to be untrue. Like all euphorbias, they can cause skin irritation, and I wouldn’t want to eat a poinsettia risotto or feed any to my dog or cat, but generally they are inoffensive plants. The Aztecs used the plant for traditional medicine, and one of the active chemicals in poinsettia is being investigated as a potential drug to treat Alzheimers disease.

Poinsettias in front of an altar in the Philippines (Photo By Ramon FVelasquez)

In Mexico, a 16th century legend tells of a poor girl who wanted to bring some flowers to the altar at Christmas, but couldn’t afford to buy any. An angel told her to pick some weeds and in the morning they had turned into poinsettias. The red colour is supposed to represent the blood of Christ, and the flower shape the Star of Bethlehem. And goodness, we have just missed National Poinsettia Day, which is on 12th December. Apparently the poinsettia is the most valuable potted plant in the world in terms of sales, with over 70 million plants sold in the US every year, to a value of about $250m.

How sad, then, that by January most of the plants are looking very sad, with their leaves dropping off and their glory much reduced. My Dad was a dab hand at bringing them back to life for the following Christmas, and though I’m pretty sure that he didn’t do anything as scientific as the advice below, it’s certainly possible.

Andrew Fuller from Bridge Farm Group in Spalding, UK, recommends that the poinsettia gets 12 to 14 hours of darkness per day for about two months once it’s lost its leaves. You can do this by putting the plant into a cupboard for that period, or sticking a bag over it. In a commercial greenhouse, the plants are actually ‘put to bed’ by pulling the curtains every night, which seems rather sweet to me. You will have to remember to do it every night, though. I have a suspicion that Dad just put the poinsettia into a room that wasn’t well lit for a few months and held off on the watering, to ‘give it a rest’.

And finally, a poem, by Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1889 – 1948). As I look out at the snow, it reminds me that for many people, December is a warm month. What a thought.

Parsnips (Pastinaca sativa)

Dear Readers, I’m not sure when roast parsnips became a part of our Christmas feast in the Bug Woman household, but it feels like a relatively recent thing. I’m pretty sure that we didn’t eat them when we lived in East London, so we would have been parsnip-less until about 1975. Then when we moved to the dizzy heights of Seven Kings (still in London but very slightly more Essex-y) parsnips started to crop up when we had roast beef, debuting at Christmas in about 1978. What about you, UK readers? Were parsnips ever a Christmas thing for you or was it just us?

At any rate, the parsnip is a member of the carrot family, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in flower. From the photos, it looks as if it could have a future as an ornamental, with very pretty umbels of yellow flowers which would no doubt attract clouds of hoverflies. As the gardeners amongst you already know, parsnip is a biennial like so many of the umbellifers, producing a rosette of leaves in year one, followed by the flowers in year two.

Parsnips in flower (Photo By Skogkatten at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56154151)

The parsnip comes originally from Eurasia, but has been in the UK since the Romans brought it (though there is some confusion between carrots and parsnips in Roman literature). Its sweetness meant it was used as a substitute for sugar before sugar beet came along, and indeed there are still lots of recipes out there for parsnip cakes. Don’t do what I did and try to make a swede (rutabaga) cake though – the one that I created had a kind of satanic sulphurous undertone that no amount of cream cheese icing could disguise.

In his column in The Guardian, Nigel Slater mentions a dish called ‘parsnips Molly Parkin’ –

“The recipe sounds somewhat unlikely, as it involves layering browned parsnips and tomatoes with brown sugar and cream, and baking it slowly till the sliced roots have softened and the cream is a rich, sweet sauce. In fact, the result is much less sweet than you would suspect. I have recently done the same with beetroot and it works a treat.”

Well, I’m not sure, I have to say. Maybe one for if you have a glut on your allotment?

This spiced orange and parsnip cake looks as if it could work, though, and it’s by no less a a personage than Nadiya Hussain, probably my favourite Great British Bake Off winner of all time.

Spiced orange and parsnip cake by Nadiya Hussain (from https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/recipes/parsnip-and-orange-spiced-cake/)

Here at Schloss Bug Woman though parsnips are generally roasted (no pre-boiling, they’re fine as they are). While watching Masterchef The Professionals this year I was astonished to hear Monica Galetti say that you didn’t need to cut out the core, which I have been doing religiously since 1978, as my mother taught me. Turns out that Monica is correct, and the core cooks down to softness in the same time as the rest of the vegetable, plus less waste, which can only be a good thing. You live and learn, as they say. The ones below have been roasted with honey and mustard, which sounds a tad too sweet to me, but who knows?

Roast parsnips with honey and mustard (Photo By Takeaway – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19289587)

Not everybody appreciates the ways of the parsnip, however. In France I believe that they are considered only fit for animal food, and in Italy they are fed to the pigs that are used to make parma ham. There’s a saying on the island of Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands) that ‘the little pig gets the biggest parsnip’, meaning that the youngest child is the one who is most spoilt. It also points up that it’s not just Italian pigs who get to feast on this root vegetable.

The ancient Romans considered parsnips an aphrodisiac, and the Emperor Tiberius accepted part of his tribute from Germania in ‘white carrots’.  On a more domestic note,  my Uncle Roy used to make the most migraine-inducing cloudy wine with them. Every Christmas we were given a glass of his latest brew, and I regret to say that most of it ended up in the pot that the rubber plant lived in, lest we return home in no state to eat our Christmas turkey. Strange to say, the rubber plant thrived, which just goes to show what ideal plants they are for dysfunctional households.

Rubber plant (Ficus elastica var Robusta). Photo By Mokkie – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31954353

Interestingly though, who would have thought that the  humble parsnip could be dangerous (and not just in my Uncle Roy’s wine?) Like many umbellifers (Giant Hogweed comes to mind), the wild parsnip plant contains compounds which are phototoxic – they cause blisters when skin that has been in contact with parsnip sap is exposed to the sun (photodermatitis). They can also cause these effects in poultry and other livestock, so hopefully the Parma ham pigs don’t ever get the chance to eat the leaves or stems of the plant. Nigel Slater also mentions that old, woody specimens of parsnip were thought to induce madness, and that one time it was known as ‘the mad parsnip’.

The harmful chemicals don’t, however,  deter the caterpillars of several rather lovely moths and butterflies that feed on parsnip leaves, who instead use the toxins to deter predators.  In North America we have the parsnip swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)…

Female parsnip swallowtail (Photo By Spinus Nature Photography (Spinusnet) – Own work: Spinus Nature Photography Black swallowtail, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46117206)

and in Europe there’s the Common Swift moth (Korscheltellus lupulinus) and the Ghost Moth (Hepialus humuli), where there is a marked difference between the sexes. The male Ghost Moth performs an aerial display coupled with pheromones to attract a female.

Common Swift Moth (Photo By © entomartIn  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=295454)

Male (left) and female (right) Ghost Moths (Photo By Ben Sale from UK – Ghost Moth pair, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46076336)

And here, to finish, is a proverb and a very short poem. First up, ‘fine words butter no parsnips’ – this dates back to about 1600, and even then it had the sense that ‘talk alone won’t improve anything’. Here’s no other than Sherlock Holmes expounding on the statement:

“I tried to reason with her, but she insists she will be at her wits’ end until she knows the truth about her husband,” Lestrade sighed.

“Fine words butter no parsnips,” Sherlock replied. “While your intentions are admirable and your speech no doubt soothing, it is no substitute for the truth she seeks. That is why it is imperative for us to find that truth, and as quickly as possible.”

And here is Ogden Nash, on the parsnip:

The Parsnip

The parsnip, children, I repeat
Is simply an anaemic beet.
Some people call the parsnip edible;
Myself, I find this claim incredible

Clearly Ogden has never had Parsnips Molly Parkin.

Parsnips Molly Parkin from https://www.riverford.co.uk/recipes/parsnips-molly-parkin