Oxford ragwort - rail traveller extraordinaire

 

Oxford ragwort Senecio squalidus, growing on the wall of Hexham Moot Hall. 

A native to the volcanic cinder slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, introduced into Oxford University Botanic Garden in the 17th. century where its plumed, airborne seeds soon carried it over the garden wall. It didn’t get far until the railways arrived, when the ballast between the tracks proved to be a good substitute for Etna’s volcanic slopes.

 Its buoyant seeds, wafted along in the slipstream of passing trains, carried it along the route of the great Western Railway, then beyond along the tracks of other railway companies. Sometimes it even travelled inside trains: Geoffrey Grigson, in his An Englishman’s Flora, recounts the story of botanist George Claridge Druce watching a seed drift in through his train window in Oxford station, travel with him suspended in air then drift out again when the train reached Tilehurst in Berkshire. It’s now a common sight in towns throughout Britain, brightening up our walls and pavements.

Oxford ragwort’s population was boosted by the German Luftwaffe blitz on Britain’s cities during World War 2 when, along with rosebay willowherb, it colonised rubble-strewn bomb sites.

Danish scurvy-grass Cochlearia danica

 

Seen on my walk into town this morning - an exquisite rain-glossed rosette of fresh, spoon-shaped succulent leaves of Danish scurvy-grass Cochlearia danica, growing in the grime that accumulated between a wall and the pavement.

It’s a seaside native wild flower that thrives in salt spray on clifftops and sea walls along the north east coast; here, an hour’s drive inland, it’s doused in saline mist that hangs in the slipstream of traffic, along roads treated with de-icing salt in winter.

When we first moved to the north east, 50 years ago, it was confined to the coast but since then Danish scurvy-grass has followed salt-spreading council vehicles inland, all the way into the North Pennines. In another month a ribbon of its tiny white flowers will decorate road verges along most of our major roads, followed by a prolific crop of tiny seeds that will be carried away on car tyres.

Cochlearia danica is member of the cabbage family. Scurvy-grass leaves have a high vitamin C content and have been used as a fresh green vegetable and to ward off scurvy, but were described by C. Pierpoint Johnson in his Useful Plants of Great Britain: a Treatise, published in 1863, as ‘scarcely superior to water-cress in medicinal effect and much less palatable’ although ‘well known to the early navigators as a remedy for the terrible disease that formerly decimated our ships’ crews on long voyages and was brought much into the notice at a somewhat later period by the use to which it, with other like herbs, was applied by Captain Cook in his expeditions to the Southern Seas.’

Scurvy-grass flowering on Craster harbour wall, on the Northumberland coast, in spring.