Dog's mercury and the perils of colloquial plant names

 

Everyone looks forward to finding the first primroses, violets and bluebells blooming in spring, but the flowering of dog’s mercury Mercurialis perennis never gets a round of applause. But what it lacks in beauty, it makes up for with ecological gravitas and toxicity.

Dog’s mercury is common in woodlands almost everywhere and spreads via an underground rhizome, so large patches tend to be good indicators of very old woodlands and hedgerows. There are separate male and female plants, with the former being rather more common. This is a male plant, with stamens protruding from the tiny flowers.

Old colloquial plant names, like mercury, can lead to potentially dangerous confusion. The pot herb Good King Henry Chenopodium bonus-henricus also goes by the old name of English mercury and it is edible but dog’s mercury is most definitely poisonous. John Gerard, referring to it as French mercury in his herbal of 1597, seems to have confused the two, which may be why he wrote that it ‘cleanse and scour away the excrements and other filth contained in the guts. It serveth to purge the belly, being eaten or otherwise taken, voiding out of the belly not only the excrements, but also phlegm and choler.’

An early start for Lesser Celandines

 Almost as soon as the snow melted rosettes of marbled, spoon-shaped leaves of lesser celandine  Ficaria verna have unfurled and lie flat against the soil, intercepting every available photon of weak January sunshine.

Every year, this ambitious wild flower appears somewhere new in our garden. The particular form that grows here is subspecies bulbifera, which reproduces via detachable buds called bulbils, about the size of a rice grain, that form in leaf stalk bases. By early summer the celandines will have withered, leaving these propagules on the soil surface, dormant until spring. Then they quickly produce deep roots and new leaves and, where there was one plant, there will be many cloned copies of their parent.

Lifting them reveals the haemorrhoid-shaped underground tubers which, in accordance with the ancient doctrine of signatures indicated its medicinal virtues and conferred its apothecary’s name, pilewort. “Bathed with the juice mixed with wine or with the sick man’s urine, [piles] are drawn together and dried up, and the pain quite taken away,” wrote John Gerard , the The Herbal in 1597..

For years, I’ve inadvertently transported bulbils around in mud on my boots. To a pernickety gardener, this proliferation of pilewort might seem a pain in the bum, but my aching back knows that there’s now no hope of digging it all out; nor would I want to. I like the idea of its starry yellow flowers blooming in my footsteps, providing pollen and nectar for tawny mining bees, bee flies and the first butterflies emerging from hibernation in spring. 

A bit of a stink

Few of our native wild flowers have such beautiful fruits, but such an unpleasant name, as stinking iris Iris foetidissima. I grew some plants from seed a few years ago and planted them in dry sandy, sun-baked soil under our garden hedge, where they've thrived ever since and produce these lovely seed capsules that open in late November to reveal their spectacular seeds.

Two other common names, gladdon and roast beef plant are also in common usage and the latter refers to the smell of the crushed leaves that have a powerful aroma of beef (though to me they smell more of roast beef-flavoured crisps, rather than the real meat). In The Englishman's Flora Geoffrey Grigson listed no less than seventeen further common local names used in various parts of the British Isles. A proliferation of such names for a plant is usually a sign that people once found it useful and gladdon has a long history of applications in herbal medicine, mentioned by Dioscorides, William Turner and John Gerard in their herbals. One popular use was as a purgative, made from a decoction of gladdon root and beer.

In his Botanical Arrangement the 18th. century doctor and botanist William Withering, always a good source of contemporary anecdotes, mentions that "the juice of the root of this species is sometimes used to excite sneezing; but it is an unsafe practice, violent convulsions sometimes having been the consequence."

I rather like the flowers that are unspectacular and reminiscent of faded denim, but Withering wasn't so impressed, describing them as being "of a disagreeable purplish ash colour", also mentioning that in his day there was also a variegated-leaved form which now seems to have disappeared from cultivation.

The Wisdom of Solomon and a Misogynist Joke (?!) in a 16th. century herbal

We recently found this large patch of Solomon's Seal Polygonatum multiflorum growing amongst bluebells in the wild flower meadows near Hawthorn Dene on the Durham coast. It's a native species but certainly a garden escape along this coast.

There are various stories about how it earned its common name but the most likely seem to relate to the disc-shaped scars on the surface of its rhizomes or to the pattern of vascular bundles in the rhizome that are revealed if you cut it into thin slices (for herbal use - see below), which supposedly look like royal seals with Hebrew writing. How this is linked to Solomon, he of 700 wives and 300 concubines, remains a mystery. John Gerard quotes the story in his Herbal of 1597. 

The reason Gerard included it in his herbal was that the plant has a history of use in medicine that dates back to the days of the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides, especially for treating bruises and broken bones. Gerard says that "the root of Solomons seale stamped while it is fresh and greene, and applied, taketh away in one night, or two at the most, any bruise, blacke or blew spots gotten by falls or womens wilfulnesse, in stumbling upon their hasty husbands fists, or such like", which is a quip that no doubt might have amused his renaissance readers (and maybe multi-wifed Solomon) but  which most would find deplorable in our thankfully more enlightened times. 

He also mentions that Matthiolus, the Italian 16th. century physician, "teacheth that a water drawn out of the roots, wherewith the women of Italy use to scour their faces from sunne-burning, freckles, morphew, and any such deformities of the skin" which, - who knows? - might yet be revived by the cosmetics industry.

Wildlife on Walls: 7. Wall Pennywort

Wall pennywort Umbilicus rupestris is one of those plants that would be much less common if humans hadn't built the perfect habitat for it, althought its distribution is geographically restricted by climate. It's confined mostly to the milder south western part of the British Isles. This photograph was taken near the Pembrokeshire village of Dale in Milford Haven, where the distinctive style of dry stone walling, constructed from vertical flat rock, provides the perfect niche for the plant.


I have tried to introduce this plant in a stone wall in  my garden here in north east England and although it survived for a while our severe winters killed it. 


The leaf stalk is attached to the centre of the fleshy, circular leaves, like an umbrella shaft - an arrangement known as peltate in botanical parlance. That produces a belly button-like dimple in the upper leaf surface, which accounts for its other common name, navelwort. John Gerard also included the mildly erotic names lady's navel and hortus veneris (the garden of Venus) in his herbal.