I’m allergic to plants in the obvious sense that I get terrible hay-fever between March and October and I always wonder if, when people see me in the street during those months, they might see my streaming eyes and nose and wonder if I’ve just had some terrible news. But I’m also allergic to the idea of picking them. Madame has no such inhibitions and it’s a rare day when we don’t have a small jug of wildflowers from the allotment in the middle of the table. Occasionally I suspect they make me sneeze but I wouldn’t be without them. Thinking for instance about the Cowslip, the dilemma about picking them becomes more insistent because they’ve declined so much in the past due mainly to changed farming practices and chemical weedkillers. The idea that we mustn’t pick them is a bit of an urban myth because they’re not legally protected if you just pick them for that traditional jam jar display. If, however, you’re making cowslip wine and need a bucketful of flower heads, your actions would be extremely thoughtless and reprehensible and if you uproot a few plants for your garden without the owner’s permission you’d be committing a criminal offence under the Theft Act 1968. If you gather flowers and leaves for personal use in making herbal medicines it’s lawful, but it’s unethical if you strip a whole cluster bare and illegal to dig the roots up without permission. If you forage to supply your phytomedical business then you might get an appointment with our learned friends. It’s a legal but also an ethical minefield which I prefer to resolve by trying to take the best possible photographs to use for identification and taking the bare minimum from a plant only if I need to take it home for further work. I’m bound to say that the decline of wildflowers is very little to do with over enthusiastic picking as opposed to intensive farming and chemical sprays but legal sanctions and self restraint engender a cautious attitude. There’s another reason – amusingly expressed on a T shirt doing the rounds at the moment with the slogan – “All plants are edible; some of them only once”. The gravest danger lurks for any ill informed forager who thinks that because it’s wild it must be good for you.
But this raises the issue concerning learning our plants which begins with falling in love with them. At that crucial early stage how is anyone supposed to decide whether a pretty looking plant is on Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act if they don’t even know that such an act exists. Wildlife programmes on TV rarely pay much attention to plants, and when they do it’s usually the show stoppers that get the attention. It’s hard to imagine getting a programme about common weeds getting on to the screen without a Dalek shouting “Exterminate”. My Mum learned her plants by osmosis. She only ever used latin names if they had become common by usage but most of the time it was the common name used in her part of the Chilterns. She not only knew their names and where to find them, she also knew what they were used for. Brimstone and treacle was the name of a very unpleasant blood tonic not the title of a Dennis Potter play. Glycerine and thymol was a gargle for sore throat; dock leaves eased nettle stings although broadleaf plantain is better and if you’ve got the patience you can peel off the outer layer of a Navelwort leaf leaving a cooling substitute for an Elastoplast. Zinc and castor oil (Zac) – probably made up by the local pharmacist was the go-to remedy for rashes along with calamine (zinc) lotion for chicken pox. These were all well known and traditional remedies for the everyday complaints – the piles and varicose veins, childhood illnesses, constipation (my Dad was a martyr to his bowels!). So there was nothing strange and technical about a licorice stick or a Dandelion root and conversely all country children knew about deadly nightshades and Foxglove. For the overwhelming majority of children today even those common plant names are another language altogether and so plants – because they don’t know what they’re called or what they do, disappear to the background of consciousness and the reach what’s come to to be called “green blindness”.
Herbal medicine or Phytomedicine as they now call it – possible because it sounds posher and less attached to the peasantry – demands a wide knowledge of plants. Dying and weaving use many wild plants for colours, foragers introduce old foods to a new generation so long as they know what they’re doing and don’t flout the law but for the average person there’s a huge gulf between liking plants and understanding their names and broad place in the culture. Many £500 weekend courses suggest that the freedom of the earth is yours when you’ve seen a Thornapple or a Death Cap just once, and every year someone will have a final meal of Hemlock Water Dropwort. It takes time to know even the basics fully and because we’re no longer peasants, drip fed the meanings of plants; but we have to do it the hard way on our hands and knees, and through books.
My own very cautious venture into plant medicine is confined to making calendula cream which is wonderful for skin complaints and we make a great deal of it using marigolds we grow on the allotment. I also made a batch of medicine for Madame which took ages and tasted filthy with no notable result, but the experience taught me a great deal and showed me where to obtain the plants I couldn’t forage or grow myself. However many everyday herbs which we grow on the allotment are foods, packed with vitamins and trace elements as well as specific molecules which have an effect on everyday complaints. Here I am, sitting and typing in rude health, having taken a digoxin tablet with my breakfast. This is a drug synthesized from the Foxglove and deadly in the event of overdoing it. Plants – and perhaps this is one of the most exciting and staggering gifts they bring to the human race – have the gift of putting together complex molecules which Big Pharma is only too pleased to identify, synthesize or refine and then patent making shedloads of money in the process. The Foxglove doesn’t even get a cursory thank-you on my Digoxin packet!
Just out of interest I did a bit of research on any commonly used medicinal herbs which are also on Schedule 8 and therefore fully protected. A bit of jiggery pokery and a small Python computer routine – AI, not written by me – compared the British Herbal Pharmacopoeia with the latest Schedule 8 list and came up with the fascinating fact there is only one plant appearing in both lists – the Marsh Gentian, which I’ve never seen – and three near misses with Centaury Thistles which would be easy to sort out in the field. Bear in mind, though that the UK National Trust, many wildlife trusts and all Sites of Special Scientific Interest forbid any taking of even parts of plants so it’s not an open house on herbs.
If you read my last post concerning the ghost garden where we’re staying we did a bit more research and discovered that the overgrown garden is the remnant of the guest house nearby whose owner was a keen gardener and botanist. So yes – it’s a melancholy oddity bearing in mind the hill farms surrounding us but it must have been lovely in its heyday.
