Bistort Polygonum bistorta: wild flower, food and herbal medicine

 

Bistort Polygonum bistorta, flowering in damp hollows in an old hay meadow at Wolsingham in Weardale, on a route that I often take on one of my local walks.

From a distance the pink flower spikes look like orchids, but this plant is a member of the much less charismatic dock family. It lacks orchids’ botanical celebrity status but has an interesting history in food and folk medicine.

I’ve never dug it up so can only take on trust accounts that say that its underground rhizome is often coiled like a snake, the source of its alternative colloquial names adderwort and snakeweed in Somerset, and its ancient use in treating snakebite.

In a less-lethal context, bistort has a long association with assisting pregnancy: ‘to help to conceyvve, make electuary of powdre of bistorte in quantyte of halfe a pounde …. and swete smellyngs spices of the same weyght’, wrote Peter Treveris in his Grete Herball of 1526.

There’s an early allusion to its healing powers woven into a fabulous early 16th. century French tapestry, The Unicorn in Captivity, now displayed in the Met in New York, where bistort sits against the right foreleg of the wounded mythical beast.

In a culinary context, it’s the key ingredient in the classic traditional Easter-ledge pudding of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Recipes vary, depending on location, but all require its leaves, harvested young at Easter-time, usually boiled with nettle tops, oat-meal and chopped onions, bound together with egg, made into patties and fried. Every spring the World Easter-ledge Pudding Championship is held at Mytholmroyd near Hebden Bridge in Calderdale.

Derwent Valley

I've posted quite a few items on this blog about plants or animals that we've come across in the valley of the river Derwent, on the Durham/Northumberland border - and today's Guardian Country Diary also comes from this delightful spot - so I thought I might post a few pictures of the location. The stretch of the valley that we often walk starts at Blanchland ....

... which is a great spot to photograph swallows, sand martins and house martins skimming over the shallow water.

Some hay meadows, with mature oaks,ashes and sycamores on their boundaries, lie in the valley bottom at the Blanchland end, with hawthorn hedges and ..... 

...drystone walls a little higher up the valley sides, currently sheltering some fine displays of wood crane'sbill and cow parsley and also home to some rather less common plants.

The older trees often have holes that are good nest sites for redstarts and the oldest trees are hosts to some interesting fungi.

Across the valley on the north and south sides the land quickly rises to open moorland but....

...the shelter of the valley bottom makes for very lush growth in summer.

As you head towards the Derwent reservoir, a couple of miles down the valley, the pastures become wetter and offer some ......

........very fine yellow and blue displays of buttercups and germander speedwell at this time of year.

If you make your way down to the river this is usually an excellent place to look for goosander, dippers, grey wagtails, sandpipers and - if you're lucky - a kingfisher.

Follow the river downstream from here and you pass through alder woodland most of the way until you each the reservoir. Here, and in the rough pastures away from the river, we've sometimes watched roe deer and often heard cuckoos.

In spring this stretch of woodland is full of bluebells but just now they're fading and giving way to summer flowers, like this bistort Persicaria bistorta.