Celandines: a nice surprise

As I have reported before, I am reading "Weeds" by Richard Mabey, a book which changes one's view of weeds, and turns one into an enthusiast. So now, as I take my constitutional around Virginia Water, I am saddened by the lack of weeds and thrilled to spot a few celandines in a glade - but on closer inspection they turn out to be a bijou type of daffodil.

Richard Mabey is particularly fond of celandines.

But the best lawn weed, the flower that says, decisively, here is the spring and the new sun, is the lesser celandine. It's rather fussy in our garden, and only really flourishes in a damp corner under the cherry-plums which we mow no more than three or four times a year. But for six or so weeks from the middle of February it makes that dappled glade shine. It's the only word. Celandine's petals, like buttercups, seem able to reflect the light, as if they were made of yellow metal, or oil, or most persuasively, molten butter...

Wordsworth noticed its precocious flowering, and wondered why such an exquisite bloom had not been more feted. For those of us who share Wordsworth's view, it is mysterious why celandine is hounded from most lawns, and why a turf of pure velvet green is preferred to a multi-coloured quilt. 

So, on my last trip to Virginia Water, I was accompanied by my friend Jane, and went raving on about my boring garden and its lack of celandines.


 So imagine my delight when Jane dropped off half a dozen celandine plants outside my door! What a great surprise. She has just told me that she dug them up from her sister's Hampshire garden.

I planted them in 2 locations in my garden and I hope they "take".

Jane takes her camera to VW because she has one with all sorts of clever settings, and is trying to find out what it can do, and even goes to classes to learn about Getting the Most from your Digital Camera. We both tried to take pictures of the buds on the birch trees. - not an easy subject.



I hope hers came out better than mine (camera phone again).
 

Jane found a lot of honey bees being very active in the heather - and told me that our native honey bee is actually quite small and black, but it suffered a terrible disease in Victorian times, so other bees which were more wasp-like in appearance were brought in from abroad, but she prefers, I think, to see quite dark ones. Jane keeps three hives of bees and even made her own - thing to keep bees in - made out of straw?

Now I've got weed envy

Richard Mabey, author of Weeds, has clearly been taking an interest in weeds for his whole life. This is not something he has learned about just for this book. So he knows the weeds that used to grow in his garden and those that now grow. He guesses where they came from and how they got to Norfolk. It's a fascinating knowledge, enriching his life. I feel sad that my own ground produces so few weeds. Even chick-weed is a bit of a novelty in my garden. The odd dandelion appears - mainly my weeds are grass growing where it shouldn't be growing.

Of course, for this book he studies how attitudes to weeds have changed, and one of the historical books he quotes from is by John Ruskin: Proserpina - Studies of Wayside Flowers (1874). Ruskin joined the artist gang in admiring burdock: "Take a leaf of burdock - the principal business of that plant being clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn foregrounds."

Mabey: "These are extraordinary and baffling passages, full of intimate glimpses of the engineering of leaves, but seeming to suggest that these exist more for the beatification of the observer than the livelihood of the plant. Proserpina is like this throughout. It is a confused and at times deranged attempt to devise a new, anti-Linnaean plant taxonomy, based on aesthetic principles rather than scientific understanding.  It passes moral judgements of whole orders of plants...."   In one of Ruskin's deeper depressions he remarked with disgust that the theory of photosynthesis made us look on leaves as no more than 'gasometers'. "

Mabey: "he pours out his invective on every plant with any kind of weedy irregularity, and deplores how the "recent phrenzy for the investigations of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with providentially disgusting reasons, or demonically nasty necessities, for every possible, spur, spike .... which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism." 

 How different was the viewpoint of Henry Thoreau. "He had begun building his one-roomed shack by the side of Walden Pond in 1845. He lived there, growing his own food and living more or less self-sufficiently for more than two years, garnering the thoughts and experiences that would fill one of the greatest works of American literature." One of the chapters of Walden is a short and famous essay called "The Bean Field". In the spring of 1845 Thoreau had planted far too many beans and was hoeing them obsessively. He was not sure why - he did not even enjoy eating beans.

Thoreau: Early in the morning I worked barefoot, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade ... Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet-grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass - this was my daily work.

By the next summer, Thoreau decided to stop growing beans. He felt that they had distracted him from "the more fundamental teachings of the field". 

Thoreau: This broad field which have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? ....Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?"

Then Mabey thinks about his own weed policy in his garden in Norfolk. "The weed policy my partner Polly and I follow (and don't always agree about) is whimsical and sometimes downright hypocritical." There follows an account of the property's history and its weeds, which prompts my jealous reaction.

Weeds by Richard Mabey - Burdock

I hope these extracts show what a beautiful book this is, and how interesting in so many ways.

"Despite the trouble they cause, weeds have always had apologists seeking to explain their existence on the earth and find some moral teaching in their lifestyle. For the eighteenth-century school of 'physic-theology' (a prototype of the modern theory of Intelligent Design), for example, they had two kinds of usefulness. First, as demonstrations of God's canniness as a botanical engineer; second, as salutary scourges of human arrogance. Painters, too, found in some weeds a kind of epitome of natural dignity. From the mid-seventeenth century, Shakespeare's despised 'hardocks', the expansive, floppy-leaved, adhesive- fruited burdock, began to feature in landscape paintings. It's never centre stage, nor obviously significant. But it lurks in the margins of a multitude of pictures - felted, foppish, sometimes hard to make out, as if it were some kind of emblem whose meaning the viewer had to decipher. It was the first weed to be credited with some kind of artistic - or architectural - beauty.

***

"It haunts woodland clearings (probably its native home, roadsides, field edges and the waste patches round gardens and derelict buildings. One later artist remarked that the leaves 'have a messy droopingness  - they seem to be crawling along the ground'.

Common burdock

"Images of burdock first crop up in seventeenth century Dutch painting, indistinct in the corners of a few landscapes by Jan Wynants and Jacob van Ruisdael. In the work of Claude Lorrain, widely regarded as the father of European landscape painting, it becomes more obvious. A modest tuft, its leaves mantling the rocks, sits in the bottom right -hand corner of Landscape with Dancing Figures (1648). Behind it, young people picnic and jig with tambourines. In the more wistfully shaded Landscape with Rustic Dance (1640 - 41) the grey -green fronds have moved to the bottom left-hand corner. In Claude's best known painting, Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, (1645), they  are still at the bottom of the painting, but more central, and the arch of the leaves echoes Narcissus's splayed legs and arms as he gazes down at his reflection in the water. In Landscape with David and the Three Heroes (1658), which features a lot of men with spears, the burdock (still perched on the bottom edge of the scene) is at last allowed to show a flowering spike.

"... there are plenty of flowers and token foliage ... but burdock is the only one that is drawn with realism, and is instantly recognisable.

"Thomas Gainsborough borrowed much from Claude, including burdock, and a token tuft occupies a typically Claudean position in the bottom right-hand corner of The Cottage Door (1780). It acts as an ornamental base for the dead and gloomy tree trunk which frames the mother and children...

Gainsborough made a number of studies of burdock:

 "The leaves, outlined with a few bold strokes in black charcoal, are set against a gnarled tree trunk. They are shown leaning towards the viewer like open hands, palms forward, left and right. Gainsborough catches perfectly their sculptural qualities, the heavy central rib, the wavy, scalloped, almost rococo edges. What burdock suggests in these pieces is that beauty can reside in the uneven and the asymmetrical - in the idea of weediness, in fact.

"Almost contemporary with Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby's outdoor portrait Sir Brooke Boothby shows his reclining subject's feet resting in a shoal of burdock leaves...

This was to allude to the fact that Sir Brooke Boothby was a follower of Rousseau and  a lover of nature - he was founder of the local botanical society.

"Close inspection will reveal burdock clumps in Richard Wilson, J M W Turner, John Linnell, James Ward, John Constable and Edwin Landseer.  ... burdock has no specific symbolism, which is maybe why the Pre-Raphaelites largely ignored it.

"The true master of burdock display is George Stubbs, and in several of his pictures the plant is much more than a tonal ornament or filler of awkward spaces.  In A Lion devouring a Horse (1769) it plays such an active role in the dynamics of the picture...  The leaves aren't the blandly smooth grey-green foliage - leaf as carved stone, perhaps - of Claude and Gainsborough. They are picked out in high, mortal detail.

"They are beginning to age, wilting at the edges, showing patches of brown rust. One is already dead, a tan husk drooping towards the ground. A weed, Stubbs seems to be suggesting, experiences stress and ageing like any other living thing.

 "This is an unusual perspective on botanical beauty, that it might take the form of elegance under pressure - what you might call grace."

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.

More interesting info here

[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."

Durer's Turf (Das Grosse Rasenstuck, 1503)

I am reading Richard Mabey's book on Weeds, and I particularly liked his commentary on this painting. I happen to have this painting on my pinboard - which is a display of art cards which I change from time to time - my art gallery - I bought this one in an art gallery in Vienna - but you could only buy it if you bought a calendar - so I bought the calendar. (Husband tutted at wife's extravagance.)

"To gaze at Albrecht Durer's extraordinary painting Large Piece of Turf is to glimpse an imagination piercing through the artistic conventions and cultural assumptions of its time and projecting itself forward three centuries. This is painting's discovery of ecology. This is any corner of any waste patch of land in the early twenty-first century, or at any time. This is a clump of weeds looked at with such reverent attention that they might have been the flowers of Elysium.
"The structure of the painting couldn't be simpler. It is the structure of vegetation itself, as if Durer had stuck a spade at random in the ground and used the slab of turf he lifted as his frame. In the foreground are three rosettes of greater plantain, a weed that has so closely dogged human trackways across the globe that it was also known as Waybread and Traveller's foot. They're surrounded by wisps of meadow-grass. Two dandelion heads, some way past flowering but still topped with yellow, lean leftwards. At the the very rear of the painting - and its only concession to the less than commonplace - a few leaflets of burnet-saxifrage are just visible through the mesh of grass leaves. You observe this community of plants not from above, or any other conventionally privileged viewpoint, but from below. The bottom quarter of the picture is almost entirely devoted to the mottled patch of earth in which the weeds are visibly rooted...[bad sentence] It is a visually exquisite and scientifically correct composition. What you are looking at is a miniature ecosystem in which every component, from the damp mud at the base to the seeds on the point of flight, is connected....
"No one was to take such an intensely grounded view of mundane vegetation again until the early nineteenth century..."