Category: Harnessing Herbs

Harnessing Herbs – an ever wild garden: Part 3.

July 1, 2024

From The Earth – a plantswoman’s journey., Harnessing Herbs

Of wild plants in places of transit – urban and suburban botanical regeneration; Tenacity along transport lines.

Weeds are great travelers; they are, indeed, the tramps of the vegetable world. They are going east, west, north, south; they walk; they fly; they swim; they steal a ride; they travel by rail, by flood, by wind; they go under ground, and they go above, across lots, and by the highway.

– John Burroughs

19th century traditional Canalware folk art on Buckby cans.

STEP outside the Pumphouse Garden and you step foot onto a botanical swathe cut through the landscape, a green corridor that grew up around the inland waterways network and to this day has a unique and crucial role in preserving natural highways through an increasingly habitat poor landscape.

Historically plants have always bloomed on the canals be it on bank or boat. Bold roses blossom gaily from the brushes of folk artists onto Buckby cans and back cabins, fleets of historic FMC motor boats and buttys glide along the countryside cuts, their bows wreathed with names of nature and botany: Clover, Aster, Lupin, Laurel and Bramble. A tangle of delicate floral names also grace the heavy bows of the Braunston built ‘Barney Boats’: Knotweed, Marigold, Lily and that of the purple nodding waterside herb, Comfrey.

FMC ‘Laurel’ on the right of the photo.

In a testament to the tenacity of weeds and wild plants, FMC steamer Speedwell and her crew played a central role in the Braunston Strike of 1923 organised by the recently formed Transport & General Workers Union; however beware the Speedwell, as it holds one of the more gruesome warnings of plant-lore: a legend that if you are to pick this delicate, blue, stellate little flower, then birds will come and peck out your eyes! A warning to the curious and cruel of hand.

The connection to nature has always run like a golden thread through the workings of the inland waterways (one of my favourite groups being the Fish Class boats described here by the owner of FMC Bream) and I am proud to say nature and conservation, habitat protection and creation is something we have at the forefront of our intentions in the PHG.

In the aerial photo below from 1948, nestled next to The Foundry Equipment Co. Ltd., you can see the pump house (with current PHG site to the right of it) on the bottom centre-left of the photo. Behind it there appears to be cultivated plots of land, so it seems our little accidental garden is continuing that waterside growing tradition.

The towpath itself is a riot of useful plants: apothecary’s herb and dye root Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) froths alongside the bank, Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens), the electric blue flowered food plant of the Scarlet Tiger Moth, spills it’s rangy limbs onto the towpath, Elder (Sambucus nigra), not only provides bounty from it’s flowers and piquant berries but is the host for Jelly Ear fungus (Auricularia auricula-judae). Jack-By-The-Hedge (Alliaria petiolata), like so many lime green clouds, crowd beneath the Hawthorn and Sloe with mustard-sharp, garlicky leaves and, wet-footed and dainty, the Lady’s Smock or Cuckoo Flower (Cardamine pratensis) raises her pink head among the grasses in May and June, her basal leaves concealing a wasabi like punch of flavour and her flowers nectar for one of our earliest emergent butterflies, the Orange Tip (as seen in my photographs below from the towpath outside the PHG).

Canals and railways often follow parallel courses so it stands to reason that railways also can provide a green corridor both in their working life and an afterlife, once the screech and thrum of the rails has been silenced.

At this time of year the early summer sidings are alive with shades of purple, white and yellow. Spires of Foxglove and furred Mullein nod in idle languor among sprays of Purple Toadflax, piercing through a frothing sea of Ox-Eye Daisies that bend and follow the whip of the trains as they pass; a salutation from the calm of the wild banks to the restless rails, a snap of electricity from overhead wires cracks through the bee-buzz of these floral margins and the mournful, keening cries of the ever-circling Red Kites.

Railways have a fascinating history of being places where greenery and flowers were encouraged, as described in an excellent article by Garden History Girl on the botanical history of more formal methods of beautifying the railways. In Canada too the CPR railway gardens of Canada provided verdancy and colour to otherwise dusty and unwelcoming transportation hubs, always strangely fractious, liminal spaces.

But what happens when these rails drop out of service? In some cases they fall softly to re-wilding by plants and nature in a slow take back from seeds dropped by birds or blown in on stulted late summer air, or perhaps on the wind of the last locomotives passing through before quiet smothered the tracks. These iron-struck desire lines, now ragged edged with plants and verdure, host the ghostlike pad of foxes, from field to woodland to urban tunnel, a thoroughfare of gravel crunch and the whisper of ever encroaching leaves. Bats roost on the diesel-black brick arches of tunnel roofs, emerging en masse at dusk like the spectre of the steam plumes from rattling locomotives who have long reached their terminus.

One place where you can see the positive evolution of former transport lines is the Petite Ceinture or ‘little belt’ former railway in Paris. Circling the city it is a marvel of repurposing and greening, something which could very well have gone under another jagged office development or been closed off behind spike crowned fences.

There are a few community and wild gardens scattered along the line, the serpentine rails still extant. Keen eyed, skittering lizards bask on these rusting slicks of radiating heat among the wild plants who have colonised the spaces between sleepers and parallel pathways to grow and blossom.

Below are some photographs of some of the nature gardens and community growing spaces seen on one of my walks along it’s accessible segments.

It can be said that the jewel in the flower crown of the Petite Ceinture is La REcyclerie – an urban farm, community vegetable growing space, sustainable café and cultural hub inhabiting the former Ornano station in the 18th Arrondissement. A little promeande round the pedestrian and cycle way of the Petite Ceinture takes you to the 19th Arrondissement where the first urban farm in Paris, the ambitious and angular Ferme du Rail, sits. An urban agricultural project slicker and less rustic than La REcyclerie but fraternal in characteristics with the on site seasonal, grown produce showcased in the restaurant, community growing space and strong social enterprise element.

These two spaces really showcase the pinnacle of how transport lines can become thriving green spaces but exit the Eurostar in London and we have spaces where railway edgelands have been brought back into the mud-grubbed hands of the community too such as Dalston Curve Garden, Crofton Park Railway Garden and Streatham Railside Garden which have reclaimed land formerly fallow along London transport lines.

Weary at the end of a journey and longing for home there’s one more space that leads all the way back round to the PHG and the end of this exploration of transport green spaces both wild and cultivated.

Formerly, Leighton Buzzard, Dunstable and Luton were connected with a railway line. This was closed during the Beeching cuts of 1965 and the old lines returned to nature until they too were brought back into places of transit. Just outside Leighton Buzzard is the Sewell Greenway a cycle and footpath that links Stanbridge to Dunstable. It cuts through chalk downland and as such is host to species peculiar to this habitat such as Greater Knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa), Kidney Vetch (Anthyllis vulneraria), Pyramidal Orchid (Anacamptis pyramidalis) and Common Spotted Orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) and the beautiful Bee Orchid (Ophrys apifera). Alongside these you can see the checkerboard winged Marbled Whites feeding on the nectar rich flowers.

Marbled white feeding on a thistle – Sewell Greenway. (c) Steve Makin – Steveinleighton – Flickr

Further along the former railway line is the Luton and Dunstable Busway and cycleway, it meanders along the foot of Blows Downs SSSI, where the air is punctated with the bubbling song of the skylarks, ancestors of the Dunstable Lark who flocked to the downs in years gone by and were netted then served up as a delicacy.

The busway has green swathes running down it where wildflowers blossom and useful plants abound. Architectural spikes of Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum), butterfly favourite Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis) grow among dye plants Weld (Reseda luteola), Goldenrod (Solidago sp.) and Lady’s Bedstraw (Galium verum).

Wild flowers on the busway.

Edible Wild Marjoram (Origanum vulgare) and Bladder Campion (Silene vulgaris) nestle fragrantly in the verges. Bladder Campion, known in Italy as Sculpit or Stridolo is used to flavour risotto, pasta and ravioli, with it’s honeyed, peppery, herbal leaves, so beloved it even has it’s own festival in Galeata a mountainous village in the Emilia-Romagna region. Who knew such a star of the Mediterranean grew shyly among prosaic commuter lines?

Below: Bladder Campion and Wild Marjoram on the busway sidings

Board the bus at the Busway and you can sweep through the Blows Downs, past the meadows among the downland flowers, through Dunstable and to Leighton Buzzard where the bus drops you off at Bridge 114, the site of the former Whichello’s Wharf in the day’s of canal trading. This point is the starting point of the Greensand Ridge Walk, just a three minute walk down from the swan roost at the foot of the ramp (don’t forget to pay the swan toll!) and you return to the gates of the PHG where we first stepped foot onto the towpath, which now seems many meandering miles ago, and the end of this journey, come full circle; from the ghost of trains on the former rail line, the hiss and huff of the bus, boats gliding among greenery and our own little pocket of produce and preservation among it all.

And now, to rest…

The towpath south of The Globe – a haven of greenery and wildlife.
Harnessing herbs – an ever wild garden. Part 2.

April 29, 2024

From The Earth – a plantswoman’s journey., Harnessing Herbs

Chelsea Physic Garden: Explorations into a Dyer’s Garden.

‘There are no worthless herbs — only the lack of knowledge.’

– Avicenna

Bumble bee in Chelsea Physic Garden

LAST time I wrote about the Mediterranean wild herbs in Corsica, names like Myrtle, Rosemary, Immortelle their names sounding like botanical counterparts to those of the plaster saints that stand beatific in stucco shrines across the island, and how could we bring these wild herbs into the PHG and learn from their uses and natural symbiosis with each other.

My second blog on the herb garden brings us much closer to home, back to the dove-grey skies of England, to a place that has already pioneered the study and cultivation of useful, medicinal and culinary plants – Chelsea Physic Garden.

Where the tough, fragrant herbs of the maquis had their potency enhanced by their wild surroundings the plants I am going to talk about now are swaddled in an embrace of red brick, a unique microclimate of botanic fecundity in the heart of London.

The Chelsea Physic Garden was founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries as a teaching garden and today, 350 years later, it is still a pioneer in plant learning and houses an outstanding collection of useful and medicinal plants. The garden has had a tumultuous history, and a difficult beginning but the foundations are still there today. Within 3 years of the founding the garden was enclosed in a wall which created the unique microclimate it enjoys and by 1681 the first glasshouse was installed, heated by a stove. By 1683 four Cedars of Lebanon were planted, becoming known as the ‘Chelsea Ceders’ and marvelled at, for no tree like them had been seen before in the British Isles. Three of these cedars became the first to grow cones in the UK and, through cloning and their seeds, gave life to many more and though the original Chelsea Ceders no longer survive their progeny do.

A map of Chelsea Physic garden in 1751 – showing the four Cedars of Lebanon.

The garden also was the muse of Elizabeth Blackwell, a botanical illustrator who created the publication ‘A Curious Herbal’ in 1735 under somewhat inglorious circumstances. Her husband Alexander had run up questionable debts from un-apprenticed practice as a print-maker and incarcerated in Newgate Gaol. In order to pay the trade debts Elizabeth, realising that an illustrated guide was needed for physicians to reference the medicinal properties of plants, began the herbal with support from the Garden’s Isaac Rand and Sir Hans Sloane after the latter saw her preliminary botanical drawings. Elizabeth drew, engraved and coloured her illustrations sourced direct from specimen plants in the Garden and her husband, from his dark little cell in Newgate, where no plant would set root, provided the descriptions and nomenclature. In six years she had created a work of both academic utility and functional beauty. The naturalist Carl Linnaeus affectionately gave Elizabeth the nickname ‘Botanica Blackwellia‘ and the herbal went on to raise enough money to free the errant Alexander from prison. His story ends in Sweden where upon becoming embroiled in a shady plot to alter the Swedish succession he was beheaded!

A gentler end for Elizabeth however as she appears to have lived a quieter life. During the creation of the herbal she resided on Paradise Row at 4 Swan Walk, next to the Garden, but beyond that no more than a vague address on Old Bond Street betrays her later years. Upon her death she was lain to rest in Chelsea Old Church where her name can be seen today on a plaque celebrating the ‘memory of four Chelsea Women distinguished by their learning and piety’.

Illustrations from ‘A Curious Herbal’ by Elizabeth Blackwell

It was an overcast day when we visited on the annual open day but that didn’t detract from the promise and enjoyment of the garden. The glasshouses are open again after lengthy renovation and it was wonderful to look in the propagation houses and see the rows upon rows of seedlings in colour coded and ordered collections. In addition there were plants for sale and seed merchants – an irresistible lure for us botanical pilgrims! We picked up some excellent herb seeds from Earthsong Seeds for the herb beds.

Propagation house

The smaller individual gardens that make up the whole are arranged in groupings of use and geographical growing location. In a small echo of the previous post there was a small Mediterranean maquis garden, the herbs thriving in synchronicity in the walls of the Physic Garden as they had in the walls of the Corsican citadel. A scented simulacra.

To write about the entirety of the Garden in one post wouldn’t do it justice, and it is a place I am sure to return to and write about again. So for this post I will concentrate on one of the smaller gardens in the Physic Garden.

Of great interest to me was the dyer’s garden, something we have planned to establish in the PHG. As it was early in the season we only had the green shoots and leaves of the plants showing but it gave a good idea of structure and the habit of the plants that we can apply as well as ideas for varieties of dye plant.

In the first photo you can see the upright supports for Madder (Rubia tinctorum) which provides red from it’s roots and Hops (Humulus lupulus) which delivers a golden yellow from it’s leaves and strobiles.

Through the Rubiaceae family Madder is related to the common wild plants Cleavers/Common Bedstraw (Galium aparine) and Lady’s Bedstraw (Galium verum) which also retain the familial trait of having dye producing roots. Cleavers, lacking the bold red of it’s cousin it can, however, produce a more subtle coral pink, and, as a plant most often proscribed as a ‘weed’, it further earns it’s place in the useful plant almanac by being edible as well. Hops, of course, are used most commonly in brewing but the shoots in spring are a delight lightly cooked, a slightly astringent herbal taste with bold grassy green and the subtle fug of hop bittering on the after taste. An ale lovers asparagus!

To complete the Rubiaceae quartet, Sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum), seen in the second photo below, bottom right, gives a muted red from the roots and tan from the vegetative parts of the plant.

Like all things botanical establishing a garden takes time and from the dye garden in the Chelsea Physic Garden we were able to take some good pointers for our own planting plans. The use of climbing structures and plants I hadn’t realised were dye plants opened up the potential to create a dye garden that was more that just a crop garden – it can also be aesthetically pleasing with obelisks of climbing star-flowered Madder and acid green Hops, bright yellow and red sprays of Dyer’s Coreopsis, orange Calendular and blunt thistled tops of Safflower, with Hopi Sunflower, it’s seeds yielding black, looming above.

Among them all the ancients: the yellow froth of indigo producing Woad and the gothic spires of Weld stilettoing through them, the king in yellow.

An excellent reference for dye plants can be found here: The Plant Lady – Natural Dye Guide. It is certainly a surprise and delight to discover the potential of plants previously overlooked.

Collecting Weld (Reseda luteola) seed on wasteground in 2023. St John’s Wort behind.

All this is still in the planning and I look forward to documenting our progress as we go, sourcing and saving seed and eventually using the plants to experimentally dye with. In addition return visits to Chelsea Physic garden to study the progress and planting will be made!

For now, while we plan, we can turn to the humble so-called weeds that inhabit the plot, for there are many wild plants already growing in the space that can be used as dye plants: Stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) can make an olive green dye, Cow Parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), which grows in billowing profusion in the garden, a gentle greenish-yellow, Greater Burdock (Arctium lappa), our tap-rooted nemesis, another yellow. Dandelion roots can be also be dried and used.

Outside the garden on the riverbank and towpath, Meadowsweet, Alder, Alkanet, Tansy, Goldenrod and Comfrey are all wild plants that can bring colour too – while we build the garden we can learn and experiment with the plants available already before we expand and harness their kin in our dye bed; hidden colour from plants of undervalued use. But when these plants are finally seen with an un-jaundiced eye and bestowed with the value they deserve, their true colours are not the drabness of weeds but a riot of natural and harmonious hues that sing through their fibres, a hidden glow waiting to smoulder out of roots, leaves and flowers through gentle alchemy.

These weeds have a secret, because before we have sown one seed, plotted planting plans or turned one clod of earth, the dyer’s garden is already waiting…

Goldenrod collected from the roadside in autumn 2023.

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Harnessing herbs – an ever wild garden: Part 1.

April 29, 2024

From The Earth – a plantswoman’s journey., Harnessing Herbs

“My love affair with nature is so deep that I am not satisfied with being a mere onlooker, or nature tourist. I crave a more real and meaningful relationship. The spicy teas and tasty delicacies I prepare from wild ingredients are the bread and wine in which I have communion and fellowship with nature, and with the Author of that nature.”
― Euell Gibbons

Violet flower and wild garlic

WEED. What is a weed but for a plant that is of no perceived use or value; a seldom appreciated survivor of the margins and edgelands that we overlook and under value. These liminal scrags that punctuate concrete, force thinly through cracks and cling to crumbling pointing, waving high above streets and survive, despite efforts to eradicate them.

The first OED definition of a weed categorises the weed as ‘a herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation.’ But what if, in the right context it IS the superior vegetation?

My post today, the first on this topic, has been inspired by two very different botanical experiences, but both have enthused and educated me into how we can apply the wildness of the foraged and found and the ordered selection of the cultivated and bring that into the PHG in our communal herb beds and also in the land left fallow. In addition, on a personal level, I hope to apply this greater appreciation of the herbal plant to my own gentler style of growing by allowing wild volunteers to thrive alongside planned produce.

Last week I was able to see a unique and beautiful botanical landscape, the maquis of Corsica. Often called The Scented Isle it is the herbs and shrubs of this arresting littoral and mountainous landscape that define it and also marry with the culinary culture of the island. One of the national dishes ‘civet of sanglier’ is a stew of wild boar, chestnuts and hand-picked woody herbs from the maquis, including the juniper berry, through which this shy forager, U cignale, would have grubbed and ate among the roots of.

Wild juniper in the Tavignano Valley

Oregano, Fennel, Nepeta, Thyme, Myrtle, Juniper, Immortelle, Rosemary and Rock Rose combine as you move through the maquis, each brush through the trail a symphony of herbal aromas that soporifically hang in the swift-shot Mediterranean air. Lavandula stoechas, or French lavender, nods its tasselled violet head, squeezing itself from cracks in the granite rocks that form the dramatic valleys and mountains of the interior. Bursts of bright green fennel sit alongside the myrtle bushes in the mountains, the latter’s berries being macerated in honey and brandy to make Liqueur de myrte, while the former lends the aniseed piquancy of it’s seeds to cut through the creamy fat of the porcu nustrale – the wild ranging island pigs.

The littoral maquis

In contrast to the hardy, woodier herbs of the maquis, in the Foret de Vizzavona we found an abundance of wild garlic or Ail des Ours (the garlic of the bears!) an emerald carpet on the damp forest floor. Growing among it, the purple flowers a bright accent among the white starburst of the garlic, was wild violet which is one of the edible flowers found in the wild. In addition both in the forest and littoral areas we saw Three Cornered Leek a milder, sweeter allium but just as much of a delight as the more pungent wild garlic. With the Ail des Ours you could make a Corsican style pesto, a more rugged version of the classic from the former occupiers Genoa, using abundantly grown hazelnuts and the fresh, light ewe’s milk Brocciu cheese that sits in soft clouds among many Corsican dishes.

Brocciu appears in a traditional dish, Cannelloni au Brocciu, which folds the brocciu in pasta with iron rich, robust chard, called ‘blettes’ in French and on the island. Generous bunches, fresh cut and tied at the produce markets, their fat, white stems lying lazy in baskets next to huge concertinaed Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes that would later render down to make the wild oregano laced sauce that finishes the dish. We are growing chard in the garden as always this year and I can think of no finer summer celebration of it than this dish.

Wild Garlic (Allium ursinum)

But how does this feed back to the PHG? This is not a flowery travelogue after all…It was the symbiosis of the wild plants, weeds, herbs…the ‘erva’ and the culture, both culinary and otherwise that struck me. How they remained wild but yet so ingrained in the food and fabric of the island, hand picked from the mountains and scrubland, eschewing cultivation for the rougher, bawdier flavours of tough little plants that survive in the wild. The harder the conditions the more complex and striking the flavours, the distillation of the four seasons set fragrant in their oils.

We already have Rosemary, Hyssop, Thyme, Oregano, Lavender, Angelica and Fennel sat squat and comfy on our main herb bed, so our Mediterranean flavours are establishing well, but perhaps we need to celebrate the tenacity of these hardy little plants and allow the wild in a little more. As we in the garden grow our herb beds I’d like to include these Mediterranean varieties in a harder, crueller growing area than our lovely loamy main herb bed, the seemingly arid and poor stretch by the hot wall, a place of seeming barrenness, poverty of nutrients and sun that would scorch their tender cousins – a little former wasteland in Bedfordshire is no match for the native conditions I know – but what if a little border of resilient woody herbs could bring welcome fecundity to areas previously shunned for cultivation?

To grow them together would be to allow the complimentary nature of their flavours and fragrances to be realised. In the second part of this blog post I’ll speak more on the challenges of growing some varieties in the UK and botanical geographical grouping and discovery when I discuss our visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Immortelle or ‘curry plant’ growing wild on the citadel in Corte.

Corsica was a botanical wonder and I left with a greater love and respect for these wild and robust little plants that bring so much bounty from their tough existence. Bringing these varieties into the garden and grouped together as they would be in nature may not be quite the Mediterranean escape I crave a return to, but every time a solemn little raindrop hits their leaves, or you brush past them on a hot, fractious day, rich with insect static and mid-afternoon sleepiness a little part of the maquis rises.

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