Mouse Plant, Arisarum proboscideum

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Mouse Plant, Arisarum proboscideum

Mouse Plant, Arisarum proboscideum – late February 2016

We had a very mild autumn and early winter here in Norwich and many plants flowered much earlier than usual. Our wallflowers began to flower in December and daffodils began to flower at least a month early.

Our Mouse Plant, Arisarum proboscideum, also flowered early this year. It came into flower in January and is still in full flower as I write. In a more normal year (if we get them any more) it would be in flower in April and May.

Mouse Plant is a native perennial from south-west Spain and central and southern Italy, where it grows in woodland. Like many woodland plants, its leaves emerge from the soil early in the spring, then it flowers and dies back, becoming totally dormant after midsummer. It likes to grow in woodland soil with a reasonable supply of moisture (“moist but well drained“) but it doesn’t like very clay heavy soils. A low, spreading plant, it only reaches 20 centimetres (eight inches) in height.

I grow my plant in a pot because this is the best way to see its structure, including the unusual flowers that resemble a family of mice nesting beneath the glossy green arrow-shaped leaves. Growing it in a pot also means that I can give it slightly richer soil than our garden’s sandy loam and I can keep it in a shady place for most of the year. If you have a shady spot in your garden with the right type of soil, Mouse Plant will happily spread – albeit very politely – and will cover the ground [Note 1]. If you keep it in a pot, make sure it is well watered, but not waterlogged. The Gardening Knowhow website has some good tips for growing the plant. It is quite hardy and shrugs off most frosts. In the United States, it is hardy in USDA Zone 7 and, in a sheltered location, USDA Zone 6. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, the plant flowers from September to November.

Mouse Plant is a member of the Araceae, the Arum family, which also contains larger plants such as Cuckoo Pint (Arum maculatum), Dragon Arum (Dracunculus vulgaris) and the spectacular Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), from Sumatra, which has to been seen and smelt to be believed. Members of the Araceae have flowers borne on an inflorescence known as a spadix, which is often partially enclosed in a leaf-like bract known as a spathe. In the Mouse Plant, the spadix is hidden away within the hooded dark purplish-brown spathe which grows up to five centimetres (two inches) long and tapers into a tail that can reach fiteen centimetres (six inches) long. Small flies, such as fungus gnats, are attracted to the flowers by a faint smell (said to be like mushrooms) that is hardly noticeable to the human nose. Once inside, the insects transfer pollen from male to female flowers as they attempt to escape.

The name Arisarum is derived from the Greek word arisaron, which was used by Dioscorides in reference to aris, aridos, which was the name of a small herb mentioned by Pliny. Proboscideum comes from the Greek word proboskis (‘proboscis’ in English), which means “elephant’s trunk”.

If you want to encourage children to garden (and I recommend that you do), the Mouse Plant may help. The Pioneer Plants website tells us that “children can easily divide established clumps in early summer, and have their own nest of mice the following year”. But why should children have all the fun? This plant is worth growing to delight the inner child, whatever their age.

I bought my plant from a local nursery but it is also available online in the UK from The Beth Chatto Gardens.

Notes

Note 1 – Words of warning from Scotland (30th April 2020).

Sometimes Arisarum proboscideum can like its growing conditions a bit too much. Thanks to Angus from St. Andrews, who e-mailed to tell me:

“In a lifetime of gardening, it is the most pernicious grower of anything I have come across. Having moved to our present house and garden five years ago, I have spent endless hours attempting to eradicate it from a rockery, where it springs up through everything else. It is well nigh impossible to remove all the tiny tubers. I would not recommend it to anyone!”

Friends of Earlham Cemetery Black Poplars (2)

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Yesterday we planted out nine young native Black Poplar trees at Marston Marshes, a local nature reserve on the southern edge of Norwich, by the River Yare.

The trees were grown from cuttings taken from trees in Earlham Cemetery in Norwich in March 2014. Members of Friends of Earlham Cemetery potted up the cuttings and looked after them and by the end of last year we had ten healthy, well established trees. We used deep pots, used for growing climbers, to give the trees a good root depth. As the trees like wet conditions, we stood the pots in seed trays full of water and this has encouraged good root growth.

Planting Black PoplarsThe tenth tree is going to be planted at Tyrrel’s Wood, a Woodland Trust reserve near Long Stratton in South Norfolk, to replace a large native Black Poplar that was blown down in a gale earlier this winter.

We have been given permission to take more cuttings and plan to do this in the next few weeks, which we hope will produce another set of rooted trees by early 2018.

Read more about native Black Poplars and the Friends of Earlham Cemetery Black Poplar Project here.

Wild Clary, Salvia verbenaca

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Wild Clary

Wild Clary, Salvia verbenaca, on Beeston Bump

Wild Clary, Salvia verbenaca, is one of the glories of summer, flowering from June to September in open grassland on sunny banks, sand dunes and roadsides. I saw the magnificent specimen in the photograph above on Beeston Bump last June, on the same day I saw the Purple Broomrape.

In winter, Wild Clary forms a basal rosette of leaves, then elongates in late spring and produces leaves in pairs clasping the stem, topped with spikes with whorls of violet-blue, open-mouthed flowers. There are some lovely photos of the plant on the Naturespot website.

The leaves and stems are covered in glandular hairs and the plant has a slight, pleasant scent, nothing like as strong as the usual culinary Sage, Salvia officinalis.

The flowers are attractive to insects, especially bees. However, the flowers can also stay closed and set viable seed by self pollination. This is known as cleistogamy: from the Greek kleistos and gamos, meaning “closed marriage”.

Wild Clary is a native, long lived perennial. It is commonest in the south and east of England, though it does occur in Wales, Ireland and southern Scotland, where it is mostly confined to coasts. It is declining, particularly inland and in the north of its range, with most losses probably due to changes in land use.

Outside the British Isles, Wild Clary is native to northern Africa, western and southern Europe (including France, Portugal, Spain, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia and southern Ukraine) and western Asia (including Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Azerbaijan). In warmer areas, such as in the Mediterranean, Wild Clary flowers much earlier than in Norfolk: mainly from January to May.

Wild Clary has been introduced to Australia, where it is described as a “significant environmental weed” in the state of Victoria. It also grows as a weed in South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. (The Queensland Government’s factsheet also has some good pictures of the plant, including an “infestation”.) It has also reached New Zealand and the United States (California, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey).

Wild Clary does well on the sandy soils in our part of Norwich and it makes a good addition to the wildlife garden. I have a small patch of Wild Clary on the edge of my lawn, thanks to my friend Ian who gave me a plant a couple of years ago. Emorsgate Seeds sell Wild Clary seed, if you want to give it a try. Sow the seed in spring or autumn in a pot in a cold frame or direct into a sunny spot. Once you have the plant, it should self-seed and slowly spread.

Wild Clary is edible, which could be useful to Australians and Americans and anyone who grows their own. (Personally I wouldn’t pick it in the wild in Britain because it is too rare.) According to the Plants for a Future website, the leaves can be used to make a tea and the young leaves can be eaten raw, fried or even candied. They will add flavour to salads and cooked food. In “Flora Britannica” (Sinclair – Stevenson 1996) Richard Mabey explains that the name ‘Clary’ comes from ‘clear-eye’, because the seeds were soaked in water to produce a jelly (“rather like frogspawn”) that could soothe and cleanse the eye. Analysis of the oil from Salvia verbenaca has found that it has antibacterial, antioxidant, antifungal, anti-inflammatory properties. In Sicily the plant has been used in traditional medicine to treat kidney stones.

In southern England Wild Clary is sometimes associated with churchyards, especially in Suffolk and Sussex, and this is possibly because it was sown on graves in Medieval times, in the belief that it gave immortality.

The plant grows in Earlham Cemetery in Norwich, where it is barely clinging on. There used to be several plants but they have gradually been mown out of existence. Every year the plants are cut down when they are starting to come into flower and this weakens them so that they gradually lose vigour. There is now just a single plant, which never has a chance to set seed. Friends of Earlham Cemetery and Norfolk Wildlife Trust have drawn up a Habitat Management Plan for the Cemetery, most of which is a County Wildlife Site. If the Plan is adopted and implemented correctly, the plant could recover. If not, it will disappear very soon.

Meadow Clary, Salvia pratensis, is a close relative of Wild Clary. It is much rarer and its native population in the British Isles is limited to twenty-one locations, mainly in Oxfordshire, the North and South Downs and the Chilterns. It is an offence to pick, uproot or damage it, although that didn’t stop the theft of plants from Ranscombe Farm reserve on the North Downs in 2008. Meadow Clary also likes sunny, open grassland, but prefers soils in areas of chalk or limestone. Like Wild Clary, Salvia verbenaca, it can be grown as an attractive garden plant. Its flowers are more spectacular than Wild Clary.