One man’s weed … Perhaps this is a word we should stop using, as Chris Packham has done with the p and v words, pest and vermin. All of the photos here are from the garden. I love thistles, this, above and below, being Sow Thistle (pigs like to eat it), Sonchus oleraceus, which I think is rather spectacular:
It’s considered invasive but is edible and can have medicinal uses. I wrote about thistles in Animal Wild and repeated it here too:
A Swan, a Badger, a Gyrfalcon, a Fox, and Squirrel and Songbird theatre – Animal Wild
It was telling that, being very fond of thistles, when I searched the websites of two local garden centres to see what they had in stock, I found myself in both cases on the page for the systemic, broad-spectrum weedkiller Roundup, which contains glyphosate, a chemical widely used in farming, forestry and gardening, which yellows and kills everything, and has terrible knock-on, long-term effects on wildlife, not only because of habitat loss but for example in badgers where it is thought possible that ingestion may even affect their breeding abilities, on bees’ ability to keep their colonies within the necessary temperature range, and likely on us too. It’s shocking that the search term “thistle” took me there, assuming that anyone’s interest would only be in eradicating them with poison.
I do pull up brambles and dandelion seedheads just so they don’t take over completely. Variety for pollinators is good. This is Siberian or Viper’s Bugloss, Brunnera macrophylla:
I am not a huge fan but the flowers are very pretty and some gardeners cultivate it enthusiastically. It does tend to take over though and if you try to pull the plants, they break off. According to Wikipedia though, two variegated cultivars have won awards from the Royal Horticultural Society.
More Ragwort than ever this year, that controversial and demonised plant:
This is also from Animal Wild:
A frequently given excuse for the use of glyphosate is the elimination of ragwort, that much demonised weed, which has allegedly killed thousands of horses. It is toxic to equines and other animals, but so are lots of other plants. The scale of the problem has been massively exaggerated for years and is to all intents and purposes a myth. Animals are generally pretty good at knowing what is good for them to eat and what isn’t and ragwort has a very bitter taste which a horse would have to be near starving to overcome and even then they would have to ingest a large quantity to cause serious damage. The alkaloids which cause liver problems are present in 3% of all flowering plants. The British Horse Society bandied about a figure of six thousand five hundred deaths based on bad science and statistical error. The Advertising Standards Authority attempts to shut down various instances of such propaganda. Which is not to say there are no deaths, there are certainly problems if ragwort finds its way into hay (by which time it will have lost its bitter taste), and so it does need managing in certain areas, but the numbers are tiny, distorted by those with vested interests and a sort of hysteria. It is not an invasive weed, its toxicity has been overstated and whilst I did spend time at Trindledown digging it up when we still had horses and ponies (the vet advised us then to burn it), there is no legal obligation on anyone to do so without a specific order as has been claimed. A Friends of the Earth briefing confirms that proven cases of poisoning are very uncommon and almost always go hand in hand with poor horse care and mismanagement. They also point out that thirty-five species of insects rely on ragwort for food, a further eighty-three have it as a significant food source, and that it is the seventh most important nectar-producing plant for pollinators such as bees and butterflies (this last figure from government research).
Sticky weed, Galium aparine, that perennial source of childhood fun, is fine with me too, in moderation:
I had never noticed the tiny white flowers until today. Wikipedia gives a wonderful list of alternative names, “sweetheart, hitchhikers, cleavers, clivers, bedstraw, (small) goosegrass, catchweed, sticky bob, stickybud, stickyback, sticky molly, robin-run-the-hedge, sticky willy, sticky willow, stickyjack, stickeljack, grip grass, sticky grass, bobby buttons, whippysticks, and velcro plant”.
I can’t find a match for this, but like the flowers:
The one I could really do without is Ground Elder, Aegopodium podagraria – it gets everywhere and out competes pretty much everything. I have been battling it, without success, for years. If you don’t get every last bit of the long rhizomes out oƒ the soil, you may as well not bother. It isn’t a kind of elder, it just looks like it. We may have the Romans to thank for bringing it here. It too has culinary and medicinal uses, but I tried eating some and wasn’t too taken.
Philip Larkin is mentioned in the paper at the weekend in a piece about lawnmowing. From Animal Trust:
The hugely popular poet, novelist and librarian Philip Larkin (1922-1985), notoriously of glum and grumpy demeanour, is a case in point. An intensely private man, he did not trumpet his views, but he did bequeath half of his estate to the RSPCA. In a poem entitled “Wires” he empathises with cattle enclosed by electric fences and in “At Grass” imagines the peaceful lives of retired racehorses, wondering what memories might linger. “Laboratory Monkeys”, originally entitled “Ape Experiment Room” is an outright and powerful attack, specifically on the grotesque and pointless infant and mother separation experiments*carried out by Dr Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s and 60s:
Buried among white rooms
Whose lights in clusters beam
Like suddenly caused pain,
And where behind rows of mesh
Uneasy shifting resumes
As sterilisers steam
And the routine begins again
Of putting questions to flesh
That no one would think to ask
But a Ph.D. with a beard…
In his poem “The Mower”, he mourns the accidental killing of a hedgehog, concluding:
… we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
*PETA is continuing its campaign against forced swim tests, “making animals swim for their lives in inescapable beakers of water”, securing victories, i.e. bans, at Big Pharma company Sanofi, the University of Bristol and Bath and elsewhere. They were supposed to help understand human depression, anxiety and drug use. No one has explained how that makes the slightest bit of sense.
Three especially welcome returns this year are this glorious Chilean Potato Tree or Purple Nightshade, Solanum crispum, which has a long flowering period but poisonous berries, Buttercups and Aquilegia ‘White Star’, beautiful in its elegant fragility.
Leave a Reply