Early blooming spurge laurel

 At this time of year we are all on the lookout for the first sign of spring flowers - the first celandine, colt'sfoot or maybe even a precocious primrose - but one of the first native species to flower is a shrub, spurge laurel Daphne laureola.  Its lime green flowers, with golden stamens, tend to be tilted downwards under the glossy evergreen foliage, so are easily overlooked. 

This plant is one of several currently in flower on the south bank of the river Tyne, upstream from the Tyne Green Country Park in Hexham, Northumberland. Spurge laurel is an uncommon shrub in Northumberland and Durham - I can only recall seeing it in three locations, but there are probably about a dozen in this population. It is a slow-growing shrub and probably slow to establish and reach flowering size.

I didn't notice at the time that I took the picture, but there was a small sap-sucking insect on the flowers, that I have yet to identify. The flowers are said to have a nocturnal fragrance that attracts moth pollinators, but they also produce nectar that attracts early-emerging bumblebees.

This last photo shows spurge laurel's black berries, which ripen in June. They are poisonous.

Winter bloomer

Last week we found this very early-blooming spurge laurel Daphne laureola coming into bloom on the bank of the river Tyne, near Hexham in Northumberland. I know this plant from one other location, in Wolsingham, Co. Durham, where it may well be of garden origin, but this Tyneside population, of about ten plants (three of flowering size) is the first I've found in Northumberland and it might be native. The black fruits, which ripen in summer, are eaten by birds that disperse the seeds, so it's never certain whether the plants are wild or are of garden origin. 

 Spurge laurel is a very easy plant to overlook unless it's in flower, because its glossy evergreen foliage has some resemblance to a small-leaved Rhododendron.

Click here for a post from 2014 about the Wolsingham plant and its pollinators.

The whole plant is poisonous, but despite its toxicity it was formerly used in what must have been very risky herbal medicine. This is what William Withering (who discovered the medicinal uses of foxglove) has to say about it in his Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables growing naturally in Great Britain, published in 1776: 'Very happy effects have been experienced from this plant in rheumatic fevers. It operates as a brisk and severe purgative. It is an efficacious medicine in worm cases; and upon many accounts deserves to be better known to physicians; but in less skilful hands would be dangerous, and it is possessed of considerable acrimony. The whole plant has the same qualities, but the bark of the root is the strongest. Dr. Alston fixes the outside dose at ten grains'.  

(DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!!!)

Ruff Stuff

This cuckoo pint aka wild arum aka lords and ladies aka Arum maculatum - and scores of other names - has been growing in our compost heap. Digging it up to transplant it into the garden revealed its underground tuber.

Cuckoo pint's rapid growth in spring is fuelled by the starch stored in its tuber, and in 16th. century Elizabethan England this was used to starch, and so stiffen, the ruffs that royal courtiers wore around their necks. John Gerard, in his Herbal or 1597, wrote a description of the perils of starch extraction from this poisonous plant:

"The most pure and white starch is made of the roots of Cuckow-pint; but most hurtful to the hands of the Laundresses that hath the handling of it, for it choppeth, blistereth, and maketh hands rough and ragged and withall smarting". 

You can read more detailed of this risky enterprise by clicking here.

Some examples of elaborate ruffs, that would have been supported with a wire frame as well as with starch:

Public domain image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England#/media/File:Elizabeth_I_(Armada_Portrait).jpg

Public domain image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff_%28clothing%29#/media/File:Anna_Rosina_Marquart.jpg

Public domain image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England#/media/File:Darnley_stage_3.jpg

For more spectacular examples and a history of the Tudor ruff, click here

It's surprising, given the poisons that are present in cuckoo pint, that its starch was also used as a food known as Portland sago. Here's a description from C. Pierpoint Johnson's The Useful Plants of Great Britain: a Treatise,of 1863:

'The root is thick and tuberous; while fresh, it is extremely acrid and poisonous, but its injurious qualities are capable of being destroyed by heat, so that when well baked it becomes edible, and, consisting principally of starch, is nutritious. In the Isle of Portland the roots of the Arum are collected and eaten by the peasantry, and some years ago a kind of farina was prepared from them, and sold as Portland sago or Portland arrow-root, but little is now made. In Switzerland the fresh roots are used as a substitute for soap. The juice is a purgative, but far too violently so to use used as a physic.'

Needless to say, cuckoo pint should never be eaten, cooked or uncooked' those Portland islanders were probably poisoning themselves in ways that medical science at the time would not have been able to diagnose.

Poisoners

There’s an interesting collection of poisonous plants growing in the sand dune system at Warkworth in Northumberland. Of these the most notorious must surely be hemlock Conium maculatum (bottom photograph), which produced the poison that the Greek philosopher Socrates used to commit suicide when he was condemned to death for impiety in 399 BC. The dull red blotches on the stems (second photograph) and a mousey smell are key identification features for this lethal plant, whose main toxic compound is the alkaloid coniine, which is also present in several other poisonous members of the carrot family. The middle photographs are of male (lower) and female (upper) plants of white bryony Bryonia dioica, a deadly poisonous member of the cucumber family that was once cultivated as a medicinal herb. In this species the female plants are particularly conspicuous in autumn, thanks to a crop of glossy scarlet berries that look good enough to eat – which would be a fatal mistake. The top photograph shows the poisonous caterpillar of the cinnabar moth Tyria jacobea, which accumulates toxins from the poisonous ragwort Senecio jacobea that it feeds on. Those warning colours ensure that any bird that attempts to eat it and suffers its unpleasant taste will remember the experience and won’t make the same mistake twice.............except that I have a hunch that cuckoos might be immune. We’ve often seen cuckoos feeding on the ground in the dunes at Warkworth when the cinnabar moth caterpillar season is at its height, and I have a strong suspicion that this is the caterpillar that they’re after. If that is the case, then as far as cuckoos are concerned that orange and black colour scheme must serve as a conspicuous advertisement, rather than a deterrent...