Saponaria officinalis, Soapwort and Quinoa Chenopodium quinoa

If you are looking for a plant that has good credentials for inclusion in a wildlife garden, then soapwort Saponaria officinalis comes close to being a strong candidate - but with one serious drawback. In my experience its rapidly-elongating rhizomes make it very invasive.

Back in 1999 a trial of 25 native plant species carried out at the University Botanic Garden at Cambridge ranked soapwort was the second most popular nectar source for butterfly species,  with a very high nectar secretion rate and second only to purple loosestrife Lythrum salicaria in the number of butterfly species that it attracted. Not only that - it's also virtually slug-proof. Recently researchers in Poland have shown that slugs avoid eating soapwort.

Soapwort's slug-deterrent properties are due to compounds called saponins in its rhizomes and leaves. Shred some leaves, pour boiling water over them, give the resulting extract a good shake in sealed jam jar and you get this lovely frothy lather. Saponins are natural detergents, found in many plants including horse chestnut seed ('conkers'). A few years ago some Austrian research showed that slugs will not cross a barrier of ground-up conker seed meal and theoretically sprayed saponin extracts have the potential to protect seedlings that are susceptible to slug damage, but for the fact that saponins are very soluble and wash away in the rain.

Saponins are also present in quinoa Chenopodium quinoa seeds, a popular high protein grain with an excellent amino acid balance, sold in vegetarian and health food stores. They illustrate one of the great paradoxes of crop domestication, which often removes plants' natural defences and then must find alternative means for protecting crops from pests.

 

Quinoa is a very ancient crop from the Andes and the seeds need to be soaked in a couple of changes of water to remove the soluble saponins, which are mildly toxic to humans. Most quinoa seeds marketed for human consumption today should have been pre-washed but anyone growing it (quinoa can be cultivated in the UK - the above trial crop was photographed in Durham) should be careful to soak the seeds in at least two changes of water before consumption.  In the wild the bitter saponins are natural bird deterrents, so birds tend to leave those easily accessible, exposed seeds heads alone but attempts to breed more palatable saponing-free quinoa have produced crops that are rapidly devasted by birds. As is the case with many domesticated food crops, there is a conflict between breeding cultivars to remove anti-nutritional defensive compounds and protecting crops from pests. In order to make many crops edible for humans we need to weaken their natural chemical defenses and then must resort to alternative pesticides of one kind or another to combat the pests and diseases that inevitably attack: such is the treadmill of agriculture.   

Soapwort's saponins have been used for washing people and clothes for centuries. By all accounts an extract in hot water makes a fine shampoo, although I have to say that the extract smells like boiled cabbage so you'd need to rinse your hair very well afterwards and maybe scent the water with rosemary (as my grandmother used to do when she washed her hair). Soapwort extracts are also still used by conservators as gentle detergents to cleanse delicate fabrics and are reported to have been used to clean the Bayeaux tapestry.

You can read an interesting article about the origin of soaps, including saponins from soapwort here.

Punica granatum, Pomegranate

A ripe pomegranate fruit is a natural object of great beauty - as are its seeds, with their succulent juicy aril, when they are scattered like jewels over a salad. There are few fruits that have a richer store of mythology associated with them. In antiquity they were associated with fertility, due to their numerous seeds and the ease with which these germinate. It’s easy to grow pomegranate as an attractive conservatory plant by sowing a few seeds, then training the resulting plants on a single stem and shortening the shoots in the crown of the plant, to produce a compact head of foliage bearing attractive, waxy scarlet flowers – but usually no fruits in Britain.

Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885, Gera, Germany

Image Source: Wikipedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illustration_Punica_granatum2.jpg

Pomegranate originates from northern Iran but by Roman times its popularity as a thirst-quenching fruit meant that it had spread around the Mediterranean. The Romans imported what they considered to be the finest fruits from Carthage, which they called Punica and which has provided the plant with its generic name. Pomegranates were widely grown in Roman villas and there are frescoes in the House of the Fruit Orchard in Pompeii dating from AD79 which depict the tree in fruit. According to Roman mythology, pomegranates are indirectly responsible for winter. In one version of the story Proserpina, daughter of Jupiter and Ceres (the goddess of the harvest), was abducted by Pluto and dragged into the underworld. In anger, Ceres froze the harvest and paced the earth, leaving desert wherever she travelled. Jupiter’s messenger Mercury eventually persuaded Pluto to let Proserpina go, but not before she had eaten six pomegranate seeds, the food of the dead, condemning her to live six months of the year with Pluto, during which time crops above withered in the winter, but when she returned to earth for the remaining six months she brought spring with her.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Prosperpine (1874). Tate Gallery London

Image source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proserpine-(utdrag).jpg

By the 4th. century AD the fruit had acquired Christian symbolism, with the many seeds within the fruit representing the followers of the church. There is a wonderful mosaic from a Roman villa at Hinton St. Mary in Dorset depicting Christ flanked by two pomegranates, which by then had become symbols of Christian devotion. Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII adopted the pomegranate, with its crown-like shape, as her badge and the fruit features in historical and literary associations in Spain.

There is only one other species of pomegranate, P. protopunica, an endemic on the island of Socotra, and Punica is the only genus in the family Punicaceae.

Alocasia amazonica

Any plant with the specific name amazonica always has an air of the exotic about it, but the truth is that this attractive houseplant has no links with the Amazon or South America. Strangely, it's sometimes known as elephant's ears or African mask plant - and it has no links with Africa, either. It's a hybrid between two species from the other side of the planet, A. sanderiana from the Philippines and A. lowii from Borneo. I've no idea why it acquired the epithet amazonica. It makes a very striking houseplant , although once it blooms it tends to lose some of its symmetry. I always think that cowled inflorescence and ribbed, shield-shaped leaf give it an air of menace; it has a hint of voodoo or witchcraft about it, which I guess is where the name African mask plant originated.

Digitalis purpurea Foxglove

The use of foxglove Digitalis purpurea in herbal medicine was described long ago by Greek and Roman herbalists but the scientific investigation of its medicinal properties really began with the investigations carried out by the English botanist and physician William Withering (1741-1799).

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Withering.jpg

William Withering was an outstanding botanist and in 1776 published his Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain, a descriptive flora based on Linnaeus's new-fangled system of classifying plants according to the number and disposition of their sexual organs and reducing their Latin names to simple binomials - like Digitalis purpurea. Double-click on the image above and you'll see from the title page that this was an encyclopaedic botanical treatise, covering everything from preparing pressed herbarium specimens to the use of wild plants in herbal medicine, and it's in this book that he first mentions his interest in foxglove: "A dram of it taken inwardly excites violent vomiting." he wrote, " It is certainly a very active medicine, and merits more attention than modern practice bestows upon it."
The story is that the plant caught his attention when a 'wise woman' herbalist introduced him to an infusion of about 20 herbs that she used to treat dropsy (fluid retention caused by congestive heart failure). Withering surmised that the active ingredient was foxglove, that strenthened heart beat and acted as a diuretic, and in 1785 published An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses, describing case studies - effectively clinical trials - of  patients who he had treated with foxglove.  The following is a typical example:

CASE XX.

January 1st. Mr. H——. Hydrops Pectoris; legs and thighs prodigiously anasarcous; a very distressing sense of fulness and tightness across his stomach; urine in small quantity; pulse intermitting; breath very short.[26]
He had taken various medicines, and been blistered, but without relief. His complaints continuing to increase, I directed an infusion of Digitalis, which made him very sick; acted powerfully as a diuretic, and removed all his symptoms.

Stately spires of foxglove flowers, usually growing best on acid soils, are a major attraction for bumblebees in June and early July.

When the bee forces its way in to reach the nectar at the base of the corolla tube its back is dusted with pollen from the yellow stamens positioned overhead. The stigma matures later, in the same position, collecting pollen from bees as they arrive from other foxglove plants.

 

 

There's no doubt that the positioning of the stigma and stamens and the bell-shape of each flower is an adaptation to cross pollination by bumblebees but the shape of the tubular petal has another role - keeping raindrops from the pollen on wet summer days.

Henbane Hyoscyamus niger

Henbane Hyoscyamus niger is a poisonous member of the potato family and has a long history of use by murderers. Its gruesome history, sombre colours and veined petals give it an aura of menace. It's reputed (controversially) to be the poison used by Hamlet's uncle to poison the prince's father, by pouring it in his ear, in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet.

Sleeping within mine orchard,

My custom always in the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebona [henbane] in a vial,
And in the porches of mine ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such as enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigour it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood: so dit it mine:
And a most instant tetter bark’d about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body.


More recently Hawley Harvey Crippen is reputed to have used it to kill his wife Cora in a notorious case in 1910, when the new-fangled wireless telegraph was used to aid the interception of the fugitive as he fled to Canada.

Like so many plant poisons, the toxic alkaloids found in henbane have medicinal applications and were once used as a hazardous anaesthetic by dentists. The herbalist John Gerard left a graphic account of their use in his herbal of 1597.

“Henbane", he wrote, " causeth drowsinesse, and mitigateth all kinde of paine… ………the leaves, seed, and juice taken inwardly cause an unquiet sleep like unto the sleep of drunkennesse, which continueth long, and is deadly to the party.
The seed is used by Mountibank tooth-drawers which run about the country, to cause worms to come forth of the teeth, by burning it in a chafing dish of coles, the party holding his mouth over the fume thereof: but some crafty companions to gain money convey small lute-strings into the water, persuading the patient, that those small creepers came out of his mouth or other parts which he intended to ease.”

In 2008 celebrity chef Anthony Worrall Thompson confused the poisonous henbane for the edible weed fat hen and published a recipe for its use in salads – a lurid example of the dangers of only knowing common colloquial names for plants rather than identifying them by their scientific names. No one is known to have suffered illness from the chef’s error, perhaps because henbane is not a common wild plant, and the chef didn’t seem to be too perturbed by his mistake. "I was thinking of a wild plant with a similar name, not this herb. It's a bit embarrassing, but there have been no reports of any casualties. Please do pass on my apologies", was his comment.

Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen 1897

Image Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Koeh-073.jpg

Inula hookeri

This shaggy member of the daisy family, with its beautifully geometric spiral pattern of unopened central florets, originates from the Himalayas. In my garden it's a great attraction to bees, that appreciate the long period of pollen production that results from the sequential opening of all those florets.

I've been teaching botany since 1975 and over the last decade it seems to me that students have become increasingly frightened of Latin names. Maybe it's the purported British reluctance to learn languages, maybe it's because these days they see fewer plants in the field, which is the best place to associate a plant with its scientific name. Whatever the reason, it's a pity because Latin names often tell you so much about an organism and the people or places that are associated with it.

This plant's specific name commemorates Sir Joseph Hooker, who found it in the Himalayas and introduced it to British gardens in 1849. Joseph Dalton Hooker, one of the most eminent botanists and explorers of his day, laid the foundations for botanical biogeography and became Charles Darwin's closest friend and confidante, as well as serving as Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew for two decades.

Joseph Dalton Hooker

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/J.D._Hooker-72.jpg

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker has his own posthumous web site, created by Jim Endersby at the University of Sussex, for all those who appreciate the scientific achievements of one of the greatest of all botanists.

The generic name of this plant, Inula, has given its name to the carbohydrate inulin, which it stores in its roots instead of starch. Inulin - which is also present in Dahlia and Jerusalen artichoke tubers - has little effect on blood sugar levels and so is often used as a sweetener in foods for diabetics. Unfortunately - as anyone who has ever eaten significant quantities of Jerusalem artichoke will testify - it can generate acute attacks of flatulence for anyone who doesn't gradually add it to their diet.

Students often complain that Latin names are hard to remember. They're not when you decode them, when every name tells a story. Just remember to associate this flower with flatulence and Darwin's best mate and you'll never forget it...

Peony, Paeonia lactiflora

I'm not usually a great fan of double flowers but I do admire peonies and these two double-flowered varieties are so completely, excessively over-the-top in the multplicity of their petals that they have a particular charm. This one, Bowl-of-Beauty, puts me in mind of some elaborate ice cream confection served up at the seaside; a knickerbocker glory of a flower. Those white writhing filaments in the centre of the flower are mutated stamens.

I'm not certain which cultivar this one is because it had lost its label by the time I rescued it from the bargain reduced price section of a garden centre at the end of the season, with just a solitary leaf left to identified it as a peony. It cost me 50p. I think it's called 'Sarah Bernhardt', a cultivar that's been around since 1906 and an exotic flower for a very exotic actress. It looks as Parisienne as a can-can dancer's underskirts, with its endless tiers of petals.

Here is the lady in question, romantically portrayed by the photographer Nadar

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Sarah_Bernhardt-Nadar.jpg

... and here's a later studio portrait, showing that she liked flowers (although her corsage looks as though it's composed of Bourbon roses).

(Image source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SarahBernhardt.png)

Most peonies have a short but spectacular flowering period.  Paeonia lactiflora was introduced from China in 1784 and is extremely hardy. By Victorian and Edwardian times scores of cultivars had been bred and it became immensely popular. I have only ever tried growing peonies from seed once, an attempt that ended in ignominious failure. After waiting 18 months for seed to germinate I tipped them out of the pot, without realising that they produce fragile fleshy roots before any sign of a shoot appears. They had all germinated but every single root snapped in half. It was a good way to learn that patience is a virtue, but I still kick myself for it....