Crosswort, Cruciata laevipes

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Crosswort, Cruciata laevipes

Crosswort, Cruciata laevipes, growing in the mini-meadow in our back garden.

Crosswort, Cruciata laevipes, is in full flower at the moment. The plant is like a fuzzy, soft focus version of Lady’s Bedstraw, Galium verum, which I wrote about last July.

Both plants are perennial members of the Bedstraw family, the Rubiaceae. Both have whorls of leaves and flowers but Crosswort has softer, wider, paler green leaves in whorls of four rather than the six to eight thinner, darker green leaves of Lady’s Bedstraw. Crosswort is altogether a softer, floppier plant than Lady’s Bedstraw.  Lady’s Bedstraw has bright yellow flowers, while Crosswort’s flowers are a paler yellow. Lady’s Bedstraw smells of new-mown hay when in flower; Crosswort’s flowers have the delicious scent of honey.

Crosswort is a British native wild flower of well-drained neutral or calcareous soils. It can be found growing on road verges and in hedge banks, in ungrazed grassland, in open scrub and on woodland rides and edges. It becomes scarce from central Scotland northwards and is rare in Ireland, where it is considered to be an introduction. The plant occurs throughout much of Europe as well as in northern Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, and the western Himalayas. It has also been introduced to parts of New York state (Ontario county) in the United States.

Considering that the Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora shows records for Crosswort across much of England and Wales, it is a plant I rarely see growing wild here in Norfolk, perhaps because it prefers calcareous soils.

My first encounter with Crosswort was on a road verge just outside Edinburgh in 1983, where I knew it by its old name, Cruciata ciliata. (Another former name is Galium cruciata.) In Norfolk I have seen it growing on a couple of road verges, near Metton in North Norfolk and recently just north of New Buckenham (note 1).

I have several patches of Crosswort in the garden, all of which came from a single pot-grown plant bought from Natural Surroundings in North Norfolk in 2013. Planted in fertile sandy loam in a border, my Crosswort grew and grew, spreading through the border. I removed most of it but the smallest pieces grew back. Something similar has happened in the border at the far end of the garden. Crosswort is a tough, hardy plant and definitely likes its growing conditions here, happily tolerating the winter shade in our north-facing back garden and regular droughts. I am happy for it to spread, up to a point, not only for its glorious flowers but because its dense ground-hugging habit provides lots of cover for spiders and insects. But after flowering I pull out excess handfuls of it.

The Scottish Wildflowers website says that Crosswort’s flowers “are followed by black berries, about as large as currants, which remain attached to the plant till late in winter”. This is true for Crosswort’s relative Wild Madder, Rubia peregrina, but not for Crosswort, which has one or two inconspicuous nutlets.

Crosswort is also known as Smooth Bedstraw, Maywort and Maiden’s Hair. Its Scots Gaelic name is Luc Na Croise. Cruciata means crucified and laevipes refers to Crosswort’s smooth stalks.

Crosswort has been used medicinally and the Plants For A Future website lists several past uses. These include the treatment of wounds and obstructions of the stomach and bowels. The plant was also used to stimulate the appetite and to treat rheumatism, rupture and dropsy. The leaves are edible raw or cooked, though I haven’t tried them.

As ever, the Wildflower Finder website has a series of excellent photographs of the plant, which I recommend.

Notes

Note 1 – Thanks to Mike Ball for telling me of two more Norfolk sites for Crosswort: on the road leading out of Hanworth towards Sustead and on Emery’s Lane at Hanworth.

Balm-leaved Archangel, Lamium orvala

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Lamium orvala

Balm-leaved Archangel, Lamium orvala, in close up.

The garden is full of beauty at the moment, as spring reaches its peak. Today it is raining, and this rare event should refresh and rejuvenate after weeks of warmth and sunshine.

One of the many plants in flower at the moment is Balm-leaved Archangel, Lamium orvala, also known as Balm-leaved Red Deadnettle. It is by no means the showiest plant in the garden, compared with the ‘Canary Bird’ rose, the huge Marsh Marigolds (Caltha palustris) in both ponds, or the tumbling masses of our Clematis alpina ‘Helsingborg’ and Clematis motana ‘Mayleen’. I only have the one plant and it almost hides in the border. But close up, the flowers have a rich beauty all of their own.

Lamium orvala is a member of the family Lamiaceae, a relative of the lovely White Deadnettle (Lamium album), and the Red Deadnettle (Lamium purpureum), one of my favourite flowers, which I wrote about in April 2012.

I first saw Lamium orvala at Chestnut Farm, West Beckham, a lovely North Norfolk garden that is sometimes open for the National Gardens Scheme, where it was providing ground cover beneath a tree. Later, when I had a chance to buy a plant, I did.

Lamium orvala is a herbaceous perennial which flowers in spring (April and May, even in June in some places). Its leaves are larger and lusher than those of White or Red Deadnettles, with prominent veins, giving them an almost quilt-like appearance, and finely toothed leaf margins. The flowers are sumptuous, a deep dusky pink, with an especially lovely flared, spotted lower lip. They have been described as being “almost orchid-like“. They should be attractive to bees, but in our garden bees visit Red and White Deadnettles instead, probably because we grow more of them, in sunnier parts of the garden.

The plant likes damp shade or semi-shade. I grow it in semi-shade and my soil is a bit too well drained to be ideal but nonetheless my plant keeps going year after year. It is in the middle of the border, where it is hidden by other plant growth once the flowers are finished, and this also protects it to some extent from summer’s heat and drought. It is very hardy, with a UK hardiness rating of H7, tolerating temperatures of -20 Celsius or lower.

Lamium orvala is a native of central eastern Europe: parts of Austria, Italy, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Moldova. The NBN Atlas has a couple of distribution spots for the plant growing wild in Britain, but you are really only likely to find it in gardens in the UK. It has a neat clump-forming growth habit and therefore is unlikely to outstay its welcome and become a garden throw-out.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Master Gardener Program website has some more useful information, including propagation tips. It also mentions a white-flowered form, ‘Alba’. Both this and the Gardeners’ World website have suggestions for plants that Lamium orvala can be combined with in the garden.

The BBC Gardeners’ World website says that Lamium orvala can be toxic to livestock and horses, but gives no further details. I can’t find any information on the Plants For A Future website, either.

There are some good photographs of the plant on the Royal College of Physicians’ Garden of Medicinal Plants website. Medicinal information is scarce, however, and the site references Dr. Henry F. Oakley’s Wellcome Library notes, in which he says “I can find no information about it.”

Best to treat it as ornamental only, which is fine by me.

Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum

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Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum

Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, in our back garden.

Those of us lucky enough to have gardens have been enjoying the recent spring sunshine, which is compensation for the current restrictions in our lives.

Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, is another of my favourite plants. My Dad grew it in our gardens in the West Midlands and North-east Scotland when I was a child, alongside Forsythia,  giving a beautiful spring splash of colour (the reddish pink of Flowering Currant contrasting with the bright yellow of Forsythia). Both plants were extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but the became less fashionable, which is a shame. For me they give a blast of pure nostalgia.

The first Flowering Currant I grew was Ribes sanguineum King Edward VII’, planted when I was about ten years old, and I now grow Ribes sanguineum ‘Pulborough Scarlet’ in our back garden in Norwich. I have also encountered the plant many times on my travels, in gardens and in the countryside. The distribution map in the Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora shows naturalised Ribes sanguineum growing widely across the British Isles. Habitats include woods, verges, hedges and waste ground. It grows beside the railway line from Norwich to Sheringham, by the edges of a cutting just south of Roughton Road station. (Sadly, I’ll miss it there this spring.)

Ribes sanguineum is a native of the western United States (California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington states) and Canada (British Columbia) [Note 1]. It is a member of family Grossulariaceae, the Currant family, which contains just one genus, Ribes, of which there are about 150 species, which grow in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, is a close relative of Blackcurrants (Ribes nigrum) and Redcurrants (Ribes rubrum) and Gooseberries (Rumex uva-crispa) [Note 2]. Ribes sanguineum has a delicious “curranty” smell, rather like Blackcurrant, when you touch its foliage or sometimes just in warm sunshine.

Other English names for Flowering Currant include Redflower Currant, Blood Currant, Pink-flowered Currant, Red Flowering Currant. “Blood Currant” is a translation from the scientific name: Ribes means “currant” and sanguineum means “bloody” (as in Bloody Crane’s-bill, Geranium sanguineum, which I wrote about in 2018).

Ribes sanguineum is an easy shrub to grow in a garden and will grow in full sun or partial shade. In our last garden I grew it up the north side of a fence, so the base was in dense shade, but the top of the plant reached up into the sunlight. In our present garden it grows in a border in sandy loam in a west-facing bed, where it has sun in the morning but is in shade by mid afternoon.

Flowering Currant takes the form of a deciduous shrub up to 2.5 metres (8 feet) tall. It can grow that wide too, but I have trained mine to grow as an upright column. It’s an easy shrub to prune and I have seen it grown as a hedge (‘Pulborough Scarlet’ is especially good for this). You can even train it up a wall or fence. If you need to trim it, do so just after flowering. It is hardy (to -15 or even -20 degrees Celsius) and flowers very reliably, from as early as March until mid April or, in colder areas, May.

The commonest garden cultivars are ‘Pulborough Scarlet’ (deep crimson flowers with white centres) and ‘King Edward VII’ (pendulous dark crimson flowers), both of which are very good. Other forms include ‘Red Bross’ (scarlet buds, opening to reddish-pink flowers), ‘Koja’ (pinky-red flowers) and ‘Porky’s Pink’ (described as having candyfloss-pink blooms). For something a bit different, there are white-flowered forms, such as ‘White Icicle‘ [Note 3]. Form ‘Brocklebankii’ has yellow-green foliage, if you like that sort of thing.

Other Ribes are worth growing, but are not commonly found in garden centres. They include Ribes laurifolium (evergreen, with greeny-white flowers in late winter), Ribes speciosum (dangling flowers almost like a Fuchsia) and Ribes odoratum (yellow, clove-scented flowers).

In my own experience, Flowering Currant doesn’t seem to be affected by pests, though the RHS list aphids, leaf spot, powdery mildews, honey fungus and coral spot as possible problems. (it is very susceptible to Honey fungus, apparently.) In the United States, species of Ribes can act as an alternatve host to White Pine Blister Rust, Cronartium ribicola, a fungus accidentally introduced from China in 1900 [Note 4].

Ribes sanguineum is good wildlife plant and provides a very important source of  nectar and pollen for newly-emerged queen bumblebees and also the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes). This is another good reason to grow it in your garden.

Tree Bumblebee, Bombus hypnorum

Tree Bumblebee, Bombus hypnorum, queen on Flowering Currant

Male Anthophora plumipes

Male Hairy-footed Flower Bee, Anthophora plumipes

Female Anthophora plumipes 

Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, queen

Later in the year Flowering Currant has strings of berries, rather like its Redcurrant and Blackcurrant relatives. These are edible but not enjoyable. The Plants for a Future website damns them with faint praise: “not … a wonderful flavour, but … tolerable raw”. Apparently, they “can be harvested when still firm in August and when stored carefully will keep until November, by which time the flavour has improved slightly”.

I leave the berries on mine for the birds. Blackbirds’ appetite for the berries is probably one reason why the plant now occurs widely in the countryside.

Notes

Note 1 – In the wild, there are two distinct forms of Ribes sanguineum: var. sanguineum and var. glutinosum. The differences are listed on the Flora of North America website as:

  • Racemes 5-15(-20)-flowered, erect to stiffly spreading or ascending; sepals red – var. sanguineum.
  • Racemes 15-40-flowered, pendent; sepals pink to white – var. glutinosum.

The plant was first described by Archibald Menzies in 1793, and was introduced into Britain in the early 19th Century (1826, according to the Online Atlas, or 1817, according to Paghat). They were known from the wild by 1916.

Note 2 – Stace (New Flora of the British Isles, Fourth Edition, 2019) lists eight species of Ribes growing wild in the British Isles.

  1. Ribes rubrum (Redcurrant) – probably native but also found as a garden escape.
  2. Ribes spicatum (Downy Currant) – native and local in woods on limestone from Lancashire and Yorkshire north to Caithness.
  3. Ribes nigrum (Blackcurrant) – Neophyte / naturalised.
  4. Ribes sanguineum (Flowering Currant) – Neophyte / naturalised.
  5. Ribes odoratum (Buffalo Currant) – Neophyte / naturalised survivor.
  6. Ribes alpinum (Mountain Currant) – Native in limestone woods in Northern England; escape elsewhere
  7. Ribes uva-crispa (Gooseberry) – Neophyte / naturalised.
  8. Ribes divaricatum (Coast Gooseberry) – Neophyte / naturalised survivor.

I have seen 1, 3, 4 and 7 growing in the wild.

Note 3 – Much of my information on different Ribes cultivars and species in the garden comes from the article “Currant Affairs” by Louise Curley, in the March 2017 edition of “The English Garden“.

(I keep a stash of these magazines in the summerhouse at the bottom of our garden for browsing from time to time with a cup of tea. My wife Vanna refers to them as my “garden porn”.)

Note 4 – See the American Phytopathological Society website for more details.