Sharp-leaved Fluellen, Kickxia elatine

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Sharp-leaved Fluellen, Kickxia elatine

In 2014 James Emerson told me about a Sharp-leaved Fluellen (Kickxia elatine) plant growing on the edge of a field by a footpath in South Norfolk, so I cycled out on a baking hot July day and found it – eventually. It was a tiny plant with an even tinier flower and I had walked past it twice, mistaking it for a tiny specimen of Lesser Bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis). Last week I saw several Sharp-leaved Fluellen plants in Norwich, thriving on a pile of dumped clay soil, and it was immediately obvious what they were (and weren’t).

Like the Weasel’s-Snout (Misopates orontium) that grows on my allotment, Sharp-leaved Fluellen (Kickxia elatine) is an annual archeophyte in the family Plantaginaceae (the Plantain family) (note 1).

Sharp-leaved Fluellen usually grows on the margins and headlands of arable fields and on tracks, waste ground and in gardens. (It needs soil disturbance to grow, as do many other arable “weeds”, such as Common Poppy, Corn Marigolds, Corncockle and Cornflowers.)

Sharp-leaved Fluellen is usually found on basic (alkaline) soils, such as light soils over chalk and calcareous boulder-clay (as in that South Norfolk field) but will also grow in sandy or peaty soils on occasion. In the British Isles, the plant is mainly confined to southern England, Welsh coasts and south-east Ireland. It also occurs in many parts of continental Europe and parts of Asia, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Turkey. It has been introduced to Australia, the United States and Canada.

Kickxia elatine has a low-growing, spreading growth habit. As mentioned above, my initial impression was of a tiny, prostrate Lesser Bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) because the leaves were rather similar in shape, arrow-shaped and sharply-pointed. But closer examination reveals distinct differences between the plants: Sharp-leaved Fluellen is covered in sticky hairs; Lesser Bindweed leaves have less obvious, felty hairs. When the plants are in flower there is absolutely no possibility of confusion, as Lesser Bindweed flowers are trumpet shaped and various shades of pink or white, whereas Sharp-leaved Fluellen flowers are like a tiny Snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus), yellowish to bluish with a violet-purple upper lip, borne singly on long stalks from the base of the leaves. There are some great photographs of Kickxia elatine on the Wild Flower Finder, UK Wildflowers and Nature Spot websites.

The genus Kickxia is named after Jean Kickx (1775–1831), a Belgian botanist and mineralogist. (Now that proper nouns are allowed in Scrabble, the word could be a useful way of using up a ‘K’ and an ‘X’ in the same turn.)

As well as Sharp-leaved Fluellen, Kickxia elatine is sometimes known as Sharpleaf Cancerwort. This implies that the plant may have been used to treat cancer, but I have been unable to find more information on this (note 2). The Plants For A Future website mentions that the plant can be used externally to staunch wounds and bleeding (haemostatis) but gives no other properties. The phytochemistry of some related species has been investigated, including Kickxia ramosissima (note 3) and Kickxia spuria (note 4), and revealed antimicrobial compounds.

Kickxia spuria is Round-leaved Fluellen, another annual of disturbed soil that grows in similar habitats to Sharp-leaved Fluellen. Unlike Kickxia elatine it has noticeably rounded hairy leaves and its pedicels (flower stalks) and corolla (flower petals) are hairless. It is a plant I have yet to see.

Notes

Note 1 – When I studied Botany, Weasel’s-Snout, Antirrhinum and Sharp-leaved Fluellen were considered to be part of the Scrophulariaceae (Figwort family), but nowadays they are in the same family as Ribwort (Plantago lanceolata) and other plantains.

Note 2 – If you have more information on this, please let me know.

Note 3 – See Amin, Cos, Maes, Apers, Exarchou and Pieters (2015) and Amin, Tuenter, Foubert, Iqbal, Cos, Maes, Exarchou, Apers and Pieters (2017). Kickxia ramosissima (now reclassified as Nanorrhinum ramosissimum) is used as a medicinal plant in Pakistan to treat diabetic and inflammatory conditions. The authors isolated compounds with antimicrobial properties from the plant.

Note 4 – See Morteza-Semnani , Saeedi and Akbarzadeh (2008).

Lady’s Bedstraw, Galium verum

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Lady's Bedstraw, Galium verum

Lady’s Bedstraw, Galium verum (presumably the shorter coastal subspecies Galium verum ssp. maritimum) at Holkham NNR, North Norfolk.

Lady’s Bedstraw, Galium verum, is in flower at the moment and it seems to be doing especially well this year, perhaps as a response to last year’s hot and dry summer.

Galium verum is a perennial, stoloniferous member of the Bedstraw family, Rubiaceae (note 1). It has small, narrow leaves that grow in whorls on its angular stems and frothy heads of tiny, yellow flowers in dense clusters. It is closely related to Sweet Woodruff (Galium odoratum), which I wrote about back in March 2013. Like Sweet Woodruff, Lady’s Bedstraw smells of new-mown hay when in flower. I think Lady’s Bedstraw smells even more delectable, as it flowers in open ground the hottest summer days in July and August, when the scent is more noticeable. (Sweet Woodruff flowers in woods and hedgerows from late April to June.)

I have happy early memories of Lady’s Bedstraw. I lived in Worcestershire as a young child and we sometimes visited Witley Court, a ruined country house with extensive grounds. It was a glorious, unkempt, romantic ruin, following a fire in 1937. I remember the shell of the house and, outside, a meadow of summer flowers surrounding the silent, dry fountains. The flowers included masses of Lady’s Bedstraw, looking and smelling lovely (note 2).

The Online Atlas of the British Irish Flora gives a map and list of habitats where Lady’s Bedstraw grows: hay meadows, pastures, chalk and limestone downland, rock outcrops, quarries, coastal cliff-tops, dune grasslands and machair, roadsides and railway embankments, from sea level to 780 metres (about 2500 feet) above sea level. Subspecies maritimum grows on clifftops and sand dunes.

Outside the British Isles, Galium verum grows in mainland Europe, and parts of North Africa and Asia (note 3). In many parts of its range it is threatened by the decline of traditional farming and, in southern Finland, by hybridisation with Hedge Bedstraw (Galium album) to produce the hybrid Galium x pomeranicum.

Lady’s Bedstraw is a good wildlife plant. I’ve never seen bees on the flowers but it is a foodplant for the larvae of several species of moths (Northumberland Moths lists fifteen species). We grow Lady’s Bedstraw in our back garden, in our mini meadow, and on Wednesday a Humming-bird Hawkmoth visited and laid spherical green eggs on it. We’ll keep a look out for caterpillars later in the summer.

Galium verum is useful as well as beautiful, and the Plants For A Future website gives more details of its uses.

The English name Lady’s Bedstraw comes from the plant’s use in stuffing straw mattresses, especially in beds of women about to give birth. The plant was also used as a strewing herb, because of its lovely smell.

The leaves are edible, raw or cooked, though I haven’t tried them (note 4).

Lady’s Bedstraw also has a long history of use as a herbal medicine, including as a diuretic, in treating skin complaints and healing wounds. The plant could be gathered when in flower and dried for future use. More recently, research has been carried out on its antioxidant properties and its effect on cancer cells.

The plant can also be used to produce dyes: red from the roots and yellow from the stems, leaves and flowers. The Wild Flower Finder website gives details of the chemicals involved: the anthraquinoid dyes alizarin, purpurin, xanthopurpurin and pseudopurpurin (note 5).

The genus name Galium comes from the Greek noun gala, meaning milk. (The specific name verum means true.) Historically, Lady’s Bedstraw was used in cheese making to coagulate milk, as a vegetarian substitute for rennet. It also dyed the cheese yellow (note 6). In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey says that the technique has been lost and that research at Reading Agricultural College failed to reproduce it. More recently, others have had a try and Monica Wilde gives some recipes for plant “rennets”, including Lady’s Bedstraw, Nettle and Sorrel. Her recipe using Lady’s Bedstraw produces a cheese with the consistency of Marscapone, rather than Cheddar.

Lady’s Bedstraw is easy to identify, but if you’d like to see more pictures of the plant I recommend (as usual) the excellent Wild Flower Finder, First Nature and (Finnish) NatureGate websites.

I can recommend growing Lady’s Bedstraw in a wild flower meadow, in a sunny place. (It could grow too rampant in a flower bed.) The plant does well on calcareous soils, but also on the neutral but sandy soil in our back garden and on our allotment. One of our plants came in a pot from Natural Surroundings and the others grew (more slowly) from seed in a meadow mix from Emorsgate Seeds, who also sell the seeds separately. In their fifth year, all are doing very well.

Lady's Bedstraw with Humming-bird Hawkmoth

Lady’s Bedstraw with a very blurry Humming-bird Hawkmoth. Back garden, 3rd July 2019.

Notes

Note 1 – The Rubiaceae is the fourth-largest family of angiosperms (flowering plants). Worldwide, there are about 13,500 species of Rubiaceae in 611 genera. British species are  annual or perennial herbs, many of which scramble over or through surrounding vegetation. But in the sub-tropics the family contains shrubs, including Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, which give us coffee, and trees, including Cinchona, which gives us quinine to prevent malaria and flavour tonic water.

Note 2 – I haven’t been back to Witley Court since the early 1970s, but the website shows that the grounds have been restored and I wonder whether the Lady’s Bedstraw and other lovely flowers have gone in the tidy up. I hope not.

Note 3 –  Ali Esmail Al-Snafi, in “Galium Verum – A Review”, Indo Am. J. P. Sci, 2018; 05(04), the following countries are listed:

  • In Africa: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia;
  • In Asia: Armenia, Azerbaijan,Georgia, Russian Federation, China, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Pakistan;
  • In Europe: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, France, Portugal and Spain.

Note 4 – A couple of years ago I did try cooking Lady’s Bedstraw’s close relative Cleavers or Goosegrass, Galium aparine, but it was revolting, like over-stewed tea but nastier. (In all fairness, it tasted much better raw.)

Note 5 – Purpurin and alizarin also occur in the dye plant Common Madder, Rubia tinctorum. This is sometimes naturalised in the UK. The related Wild Madder, Rubia peregrina, is a British native, mostly in the south-west. Rubia tinctorum is the source of the dye rose madder. Which reminds me of a limerick:

“While Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model reclined on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he leapt up the ladder and had ‘er.”

(If you want to be distracted further, there are variations on this theme, involving other pigments, in the Jim McWilliam Collection of Limericks. But if you find this offensive, my apologies – please go back to the main text.)

Note 6 – Nowadays Cheddar cheese is dyed with annatto, from the South American Achiote tree, Bixa orellana.

Wild Strawberry, Fragaria vesca

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Wild Strawberry, Fragaria vesca

Yesterday I ate my first Wild Strawberries of the year and they were delicious. Sorry, I would have shared some with you, but there were only a handful and they’ve all gone now. But there will be more soon.

The fruits of the Wild Strawberry are a treat at this time of year and have a concentrated flavour that makes up for their small size. (I would describe it as concentrated strawberry with a slight hint of bubblegum.) The plants don’t flower and fruit all at once, either, so you can keep going back for more.

Both photographs on this page were taken on 6th June 2019 – the ripe fruit, which I picked, was from a sunnier part of the garden than the plants that were in flower.

Wild Strawberry, Fragaria vesca

Wild Strawberry, Fragaria vesca, is a low growing perennial herb that can be found throughout the British Isles. It is also native throughout Europe and in Western Asia, and has been introduced to other parts of the world, such as the Eastern United States and parts of Africa and Eastern Asia. It is a member of the Rosaceae (the Rose family), and has the typical showy flowers of many family members, with five white petals, five sepals and many spirally arranged stamens.

Wild Strawberries like to grow in fairly dry places in the UK, in woodland, hedgerows, amongst scrub and on basic rock outcrops and screes. Manmade habitats include the floors of quarries and old railway embankments.

Wild Strawberries spread by seed but also by their stolons, stems which grow just above the surface of the soil, producing new plants at the nodes. (Cultivated strawberries have them too and we usually call them runners and use them to propagate more strawberry plants.)

The “berry” part of the name is not strictly accurate. The fleshy part of a strawberry is actually the swollen receptacle of the flower and each “seed” on the outside of the strawberry is an achene, a dry fruit which contains the seed (note 1).

It is a treat to find Wild Strawberries in the countryside and I remember stopping at the roadside near Trollhättan in Sweden, while on a cycle touring holiday, to snack on the fruit. (It’s best to avoid fruit at ground level near a well used path, in case of canine contamination.)

Wild Strawberry fruit are eaten by a variety of mammals and birds and the leaves are sometimes eaten by deer. Fragaria vesca is also one of several foodplants of the caterpillar of the Grizzled Skipper butterfly.

For a more reliable supply of fruit, Wild Strawberries are a lovely plant to grow in a garden, where they prefer (the mythical) moist but well drained soil, ideally slightly alkaline.

In 1992 I bought a couple of Wild Strawberry plants in a pot from Natural Surroundings and planted them in our previous garden, where they soon spread. I transferred some to our allotment, where they grew as groundcover under a Kentish Cobnut tree. I brought some to our current garden when we moved house.

We have rather dry, sandy soil in the garden and on the allotment, which can be a problem in very dry summers (note 2). Most of the allotment plants died off in the summer of 2006. In the current garden, I planted Wild Strawberries in a partly shaded border but they were mostly bullied out by Sweet Woodruff. However, they found an ideal growing spot in gravel under a bench. In the sunniest places, some of the leaves went a bit crispy last summer but the plants revived and are now doing well. The fruit is better in sun but the plants survive drought better in shade, so it’s a good idea to let the plants spread around and some should always thrive. Wild Strawberries also look good trailing from containers, as long as you keep them watered in summer: add some composted bark to a peat free potting compost.

Fragaria vesca is also known as the Alpine Strawberry, Mountain Strawberry or Wood Strawberry. There are several cultivars, including ‘Alexandria’ (which doesn’t have runners) and the more refined ‘Mara des Bois’ (with larger fruit, developed in France in the 1990s). We grew both of these in the early days of Grapes Hill Community Garden, along with the wild form. They all tasted good, but the wild form did much better in the droughty conditions beneath shallow rooted Ash trees.

I also grow the Plymouth Strawberry, Fragaria vesca var. ‘muricata‘. Its flowers are green and leafy and the fruits are covered in spines. The plants seem less vigorous than the wild type. I grow it purely as a curiosity, in a different part of the garden, so the two varieties don’t mix.

The most obvious use of Wild Strawberries is to eat their fruit. However, the fresh or dried leaves can be used to make tea. Jekka McVicar (note 3) suggests adding the mashed fruit to facepacks to whiten skin and lighten freckles or applying cut strawberries to ease slight sunburn. (“If you get bored you can always eat them”.) If you have sore gums or mouth ulcers, the leaves can be used to make a gargle and mouthwash.

Wikipedia lists some of the phytochemicals found in strawberries (the cultivated hybrids, rather than Fragaria vesca, but the compounds should be similar for Fragaria vesca), including a long list of chemicals that give the fruit its characteristic fragrance. Strawberries are a good source of Vitamin C and manganese. However, a small percentage of people are allergic to them.

Larger, cultivated strawberries are not just highly bred Fragararia vesca. They are Fragaria x ananassa, a cross of Fragaria virginiana (Virginia Strawberry), from eastern North America, and Fragaria chiloensis (Chilean Strawberry), from Chile. The parents grow in totally separate parts of the world and the hybrid was produced in Brittany (Bretagne) in the 1750s. Wikipedia provides a good account of strawberry cultivation throughout the world: in 2016, world production of strawberries was 9.2 million tonnes. I grow cultivated strawberries on the allotment. Like Fragaria vesca, they suffer in drought on light soil in full sun, but I always get a decent crop of fruit, which have a lovely flavour. Nowadays, commercially grown strawberries can be as good, but in the past I have eaten large, bland and disappointing fruit from irrigated, over-pampered plants.

One other possible source of disappointment is to confuse Barren Strawberry for Wild Strawberry. Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis, is a relative of Fragaria vesca, and a lovely plant in its own right. It is superficially quite similar but there is no point in looking for tasty red fruit. Barren Strawberry has only has small, hard achenes and is “quite un-strawberry like both in flavour and texture“.

The leaves of both plants have three leaflets but Barren Strawberry leaves are much less glossy and have fewer teeth and it is only half the height of Wild Strawberry. Barren Strawberry flowers earlier in the year than Wild Strawberry (February to April, rather than April to July) and the flower petals are notched and widely separated. The Wild Flower Finder website has good photographs of both Potentilla sterilis and Fragaria vesca.

Although cultivated strawberries are sometimes grown on straw, which stops soil splashing onto the fruit, this isn’t how the name is thought to have arisen. In Anglo-Saxon “straw” meant small pieces of chaff, referring to the achenes (pips) on the outside of the fruit (note 3). Fragaria is from the Latin word for strawberry, related to fragrans, meaning fragrant. Vesca comes from the Latin for small or thin.

Notes

Note 1 – If you thought this was complicated, I suggest you read my post about nuts from December 2012.

Note 2 – At Noar Hill in Hampshire, the Wild Strawberries frizzled up in the 1976 drought, leading to  extinction of the Grizzled Skipper colony there. Matthew Oates (2015), “In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty Year Affair“, Bloomsbury, London. Page 99.

I was a bit worried that this might have happened in the summer of 2018 at Stoke Ferry Cut-off Channel, one of Norfolk’s two remaining sites for Grizzled Skipper, but I’m glad to say that the butterflies were alive and well this spring, and Wild Strawberry was still growing there.

Note 3 – Jekka McVicar (2009), “Jekka’s Complete Herb Book“, RHS, London. Pages 114 and 115.