Botany on the brain

A little snapshot of my garden

While we’ve been stuck at home, we’ve been enjoying the opportunity to finally get on with some bits and pieces in the garden. One of those bits and pieces is digging out a flowerbed around the little hornbeam tree. I rescued it from the Sale section at the local garden centre when it was little more than a sad stick in a pot and, apart from not enjoying the recent heatwave, it’s now almost knee high which is very pleasing. Paul started clearing away the grass in that area on a day when I was at work, and I came home to find that he’d left a large ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata) and some bedstraw because “they looked happy”. Bless him. But it definitely shows that plants are only weeds if you decide they are. If you’re happy and they’re happy, then there’s no problem!

However, it turns out that, when you’ve been hanging about with botanists for a couple of years, just knowing that “it’s a bedstraw of some kind” isn’t good enough.

Recently one of my neighbours has been clearing out her late partner’s books, and I took the opportunity to offer a new home to some botany and more general biology textbooks. Which is how, on Saturday afternoon, I found myself grovelling about on the lawn with copies of Stace and Rose, trying to figure out exactly which bedstraw I was looking at. Thankfully Stace comes with an expansive glossary, because frankly I had absolutely no idea what I was reading without a little help!

Help came, as it so often does, from Twitter, where professionals including Dr Jonathan Mitchley (Reading’s Associate Professor in Field Botany) identified it as being Hedge Bedstraw – specifically, Galium mollugo.

Turns out it’s edible (I tried a little bit – it just tastes… green), of interest medicinally for epilepsy and ‘hysteria’ (research ongoing) and, like other plants in the bedstraw family, it smells lovely as it dries. The vanilla-like scent is produced by coumarin – which is also what gives the plant its medicinal effects. As if that wasn’t enough, the roots can be used to make a red dye not unlike that of madder (Rubia tinctorum), and it can also be used in cheese making. (Two of its older common names are Curdwort and Cheese-renning.)

Because I now have my own facsimile copy of Gerard’s Herball (1633 edition – and yes, I’m still extremely excited about that!), it was easy to look up what Gerard (and Johnson) had to say about it.

Ladies Bedstraw with white floures, from Gerard’s Herball 1633
A digital copy, from which this image is cropped, is available from archive.org.

It’s listed as Gallium album, and named simply ‘Ladies Bedstraw with white floures’. The name Mollugo is also given, as is the comparison with Madder. According to Gerard:

The people in Cheshire, especially about Namptwich, where the best cheese is made, do use it in their Rennet, esteeming greatly of that cheese above other made without it.

A tiny bit of bias may be sneaking in here, as Gerard himself was from Nantwich!

Interestingly, Gerard also declares that,

We find nothing extant in the antient writers, of the vertues and faculties of the white kinds but are as herbes never had in use either for physicke or Surgerie.

Both quotations from Gerard (1633), pages 1126-8

Several uses are given for the yellow-flowered Lady’s Bedstraw (Galium verum), including an ointment for burns, and the staunching of blood. That seems unlikely, given that coumarin is an anticoagulant, but Gerard takes this piece of information directly from Dioscorides, which would certainly have given it authority.

Page 967 of the 1597 edition of Gerard’s Herball, depicting bedstraw and madder.
A digital copy, from which this image is reproduced, is available from archive.org.

(And while we’re questioning Gerard’s accuracy, on page 1128 of the 1633 edition, Thomas Johnson points out that Gerard had originally included an incorrect image in the 1597 edition, illustrating Gallium album minus of Tabern (TaVern?) instead of (sic) Gallium rubrum.)

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with this information now that I have it… my daily medication is contraindicated with coumarins, so I won’t be making myself cups of bedstraw tea or eating bedstraw salad any time soon. Perhaps I could avail myself of some goat’s milk, and try to make cheese? This bedstraw rennet recipe, from Monica Wilde, looks easy enough for me to follow!

Five A Day

a list of fruit and vegetables, in colourful child's handwriting, with aborably creative spelling!
unyen!

Isn’t this fantastic?

My friend Clare (who’s a photographer) posted it on Facebook the other day, saying that their little one had been really into getting ‘5 a day’ since being given a sticker with it written on a few weeks ago. I absolutely love the bright colours and the handwriting – and the fact that it’s been helping Mum & Dad to up their game as well!

eternal magpie five a day downloadable sheet, in colour
Five a day downloadable sheet, in colour

It was suggested in the comments that I could design one, so I’ve done just that!

It’s designed to match the My Busy Week planner (pre-orders close at the end of the month!), and it has options with two, three and four rows so that you can print out the pages that work best for your family. There’s also a black & white version for anyone (like me) who doesn’t have a colour printer.

eternal magpie five a day downloadable sheet, in black & white
Five a day downloadable sheet, in black & white

I’ve made it available as a download over on my payhip store, so if you’d like to give it a try, you can find it there.

I’m always thinking of different pages to add to my own diary. On the list so far are tracking how much water I drink (nowhere near enough!), and maybe some kind of chart to show all of my overlapping chronic illness symptoms. That’s definitely going to be a rather complicated one.

I will freely admit that I’ve printed out one of these five-a-day charts for myself, and stuck it to the fridge. Certainly when it comes to eating healthily, I need all the help I can get!

What I Did At The Weekend

Paul's Birthday Cupcakes

I know it’s Wednesday already, but I had a few days off work at the end of last week and the beginning of this one, so it all blurred into one lovely long weekend where I basically did nothing. Well, I was ill for a couple of days, which is what really prompted me to think that Doing Nothing for a while would be a really good idea. And it was.

During these days off, Paul had a birthday. While he was out I thought I’d try a little experiment, and I baked a batch of cupcakes! To be perfectly honest, they didn’t turn out that well. They didn’t really rise, and the chocolate didn’t really melt, so they looked a bit funny, and they weren’t light and fluffy so much as dense and a bit strange. But, they tasted nice, and several people have eaten them without complaining of a stomach ache, so perhaps they weren’t as bad as all that! Still, I think I’ll stick to sewing.

Poole Twintone Dinner Service

After a lovely birthday lunch with Paul’s parents, we brought back with us several boxes of crockery which used to belong to Paul’s Nan. She couldn’t take all of this with her when she moved into residential care, so we are now the very excited owners (well, let’s be honest, I’m a lot more excited than Paul is!) of a Poole Twintone dinner service! We must be missing a box though, as none of the coffee pots have their lids, and we have one rectangular lid with nothing to sit on. The set is so extensive because it was added to over many years, received as gifts, and picked up at antique shops and car boot sales. That explains the seventeen (seventeen!) tea cups…

yarma

While all of this nothing was going on, I managed to make myself a Very Bright hat. The picture above is from Yarma, a $0.99 app that allows you to upload photos to Ravelry straight from your phone. It does have filters built into it, but the hat really is that bright!

yarma

The yarns are all hand dyed. The pink background is a cochineal-dyed cashmere from Elisabeth Beverley at Plant Dyed Wool, and the stripes are hand-spun Blue-faced Leicester mini-skeins by The Outside. (I wrote about them over here.)

The hat was going really well, until I reached the very last decrease row. Somehow I managed to pull one of the circular needles out of the stitches, and because the row below was also full of decreases I couldn’t figure out how to get all of the stitches back onto the needles again in the right order. (Hence the mess you can see in the Yarma photo above.) Thankfully the stripes gave me an excellent place to rip back to, so I very carefully picked up the last row of orange stitches and worked the decrease section again. Phew! The pattern is Wurm, which I’ve knitted I think three times now.

I still don’t quite know how I ended up with a hat though. I’ve been spending weeks walking to the bus stop in the cold thinking, “I must knit myself a pair of gloves or mittens, these fingerless ones are too cold”. I had every intention of working up a pair of lovely rainbow-striped gloves that would keep my fingers warm on the way to the bus stop. But then I would have needed to divide all of the little skeins in half… and work out how many rows to knit in each colour, so that all the stripes were the same size… and the next thing I knew, there was a nice, simple hat flying off the needles.

I do have a little bit of yarn left over though, in all eight colours. Just enough to knit yet another pair of fingerless mittens, knowing my luck!

First Fruit

First Fruit

We’re finally in to the new house, starting to get settled. Things have been a little more difficult than we expected. The previous owner was a smoker, and also had a great big dog. This has meant that we’ve had an awful lot more cleaning to do than we anticipated. We’ve already cleaned the place once, and had the carpets shampooed, but the entire house is still covered in a layer of nicotine and dog hair. Quite disgusting, and I’m beginning to despair of ever getting rid of the smell that’s still coming from the living room carpet.

But!

One of the reasons I wanted to buy this house in particular is because it has the most lovely garden. (Well, it will be. Once we’ve got rid of all the dog mess and cigarette butts. And pruned all the abandoned shrubs.) It’s much bigger than our old garden, about thirty metres (100 feet) long, and it already has a vegetable patch and some fruit trees. The pear tree is very young, and hasn’t grown any pears at all this year. The apple tree is also young, but has managed to produce about a dozen little Braeburns! Most of them are still hanging on very tightly, but we’ve picked these three which look lovely. Yes, a little nibbled in places, but we’re thrilled to have lots of wildlife in our new garden too.

We also managed to grab a couple of handfuls of sloes from the well-established blackthorn tree at the bottom of the garden. Although the tree didn’t seem to be excessively full of thorns, which makes me wonder whether they might in fact be damsons. More investigation necessary, I think!

It’s going to take a couple of years to get the vegetable patch sorted, I think, though there’s a greenhouse and a shed and a nice big rhubarb plant to get me started. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m really looking forward to it.

Time to rest

19/06/2012

Today I am mostly feeling sorry for myself. Anyone who reads my personal Facebook page would be forgiven for thinking this is nothing unusual – my status is quite often me whingeing about some aspect or other of my health that’s gone a bit wrong. Today’s is quite a spectacular one though – I’ve managed to put my back out. OUCH. I did it yesterday – a particularly annoying finale to what had been a really good weekend!

On Saturday we popped into town with some friends for Reading Town Meal. An annual event, with lots of stalls about wildlife, sustainability and local food – and a free meal, cooked by catering students from the local college, from food donated by local allotment holders and home growers. We sat on a hill in the Forbury Gardens to eat our vegetable curry, beetroot and bean salad, and fruit crumble. Yum!

(Paul didn’t go for the vegetable curry – he bought a massive pork pie from one of the stalls. I have to say it looked good!)

In the afternoon I went to a BIG SING organised by the Witt Studio Chorus. We spent three hours rehearsing a medley of songs from The Sound of Music, and then gave a small performance for friends and family. I used to be a regular member of the chorus, but had to give it up earlier in the year, mainly because I could no longer stay out late on a Wednesday and then be awake and functional in time to go to work on a Thursday. I enjoyed it very much, but I was reminded just how strenuous singing can be – I was exhausted when I got home, and in bed by 9pm!

Twelve hours’ sleep later, on Sunday we made an impromptu trip to Hughendon Manor, where they were having a 1940s WW2 weekend. Again, we had a really good time, enjoying the re-enactment displays, and particularly the talks given by Stephen Wisdom. We’d seen him at one of the big multi-period re-enactment events a few years ago, and Paul couldn’t resist the opportunity to see his “Mr Punch vs Mr Hitler” puppet show again! The weather was so glorious that we sat on the lawn in full sunshine, wondering why on earth we’d come out with scarves and gloves.

When we got home, I wanted to pop round to the corner shop. Unfortunately, as I bent over to pick up my bag, something right across my lower back went PING and caused me to do rather a lot of squealing and hopping and yelling. Oops.

I went to the corner shop on crutches, and spent this morning on crutches too, hissing and ow-ing every time I tried to move. Thankfully a heat pad, a short walk, and some stretching later, and the pain has downgraded to quite severe sciatica, which I can cope with a lot more easily. (As someone with long-term hip problems, I get sciatica a lot.) Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be well enough to go to work – and I have been very glad that today was my day off!

So, to everyone who thought I was bonkers for doing so much on my previous day off, you’ll be pleased to know that I have actually spent this one resting. I’ve only done a few rows of knitting, I haven’t made anything, I haven’t packed anything for the house move – I’ve just rested. Shame it took a serious complaint from my spine to force me into it, but there you go.