Seed experiments (Weeds by Richard Mabey)

On 1 May 1945, Professor Edward Salisbury, the director of Kew Gardens at that time, gave a talk on weed varieties that had grown on London's bomb sites.

"... how a whole new ecosystem had taken root in the city's open wounds. It was a story coloured not just by wartime drama but by the evocative names and addresses of the vegetable phoenixes..."

"Bracken carpeted the nave of St James' in Piccadilly... Oxford ragwort - an eighteenth century immigrant from the slopes of Mount Etna - had graffitised the rubble of London's Wall.... Gallant-soldier (from Peru) ... appeared on one in eight of the bomb sites, and the purple surf of rosebay willowherb - already christened bombweed by Londoners - across almost all of them. ...creeping buttercup, chickweed, nettle, dock, groundsel, plantains, knotgrass.. . Prof Salisbury logged a total of 126 species in all. It was a weed storm, a reminder, if anybody needed one, of how thinly the veneer of civilisation lay over the wilderness."

Actual name: Guascas, or Galinsoga (not gallant soldier) Galinsoga is named after the mid-eighteenth century the Spanish botanist and physician Ignacio Mariano Martínez Galinsoga and the English name ‘Gallant Soldier’ is simply a corruption of this name. Other English names for the plant include Gallant Soldiers, Soldiers of the Queen, Littleflower quickweed, Quickweed and Potato weed. ‘Parviflora‘ simply means that the flowers are small.

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[Earlier in his life] Edward Salisbury had read the works of Charles Darwin, and found that the great biologist's curiosity and unconventional experimental methods chimed with this own. Darwin was fascinated by weeds ... and tested the effects of saltwater on germination. He wondered if seeds might travel in the stomachs of dead birds, and sprouted seeds he had extracted from the dung of migratory locusts. He raised more than eighty plants from the mud-ball gathered round a wounded partridge's leg. ... Darwin cleared and dug a plot three feet long by two feet wide, and simply observed what plant life spontaneously emerged: "I marked all the seedlings of our native weeds as they came up, and out of 357 no less than 295 were destroyed, chiefly by slugs and insects. "

"Salisbury's own experiments were very much in the Darwinian mould. ... he tested the airborne dispersal of plants such as thistle and dandelion... he went through animal dung and bird droppings to see what seeds were carried in them and tested to see if they were still fertile.

"He even regarded himself as a potential carrier, and famously raised 300 plants of over twenty weed species from the debris in his trouser turn-ups ... He repeated the experiment with the mud scraped from his shoes, and found that "one quite commonly conveys at least six propagules in such a manner."