Jeremy Bartlett's LET IT GROW blog

The wonder of plants and fungi.

Friends of Earlham Cemetery Black Poplars (2)

Posted on 1 March, 2016 by Jeremy Bartlett1 March, 2016

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 Poplars The 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

Posted on 22 February, 2016 by Jeremy Bartlett22 February, 2016

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.

Wild Carrot, Daucus carota

Posted on 25 January, 2016 by Jeremy Bartlett3 January, 2017

Wild Carrot in our back garden, in the mini-meadow

Wild Carrot, Daucus carota, is another of my favourite plants. Like Alexanders, Cow Parsley, Perfoliate Alexanders, Bishop’s Flower (Ammi majus) and a host of my favourite plants, it is in the Parsley family, the Apiaceae (formerly the Umbelliferae).

Wild Carrot is a biennial herb with feathery, pinnate leaves and a pungent carroty smell when crushed. It flowers from June to September, and its mature umbels are a dull white with distinctive three-forked or pinnate lower bracts. Younger umbels usually have a pink tinge (as in the photograph above) and when mature, the flowerhead often has a single red flower in the centre. This may act as a lure for insects, signalling that the flower is worth visiting for food. Once the Wild Carrot has flowered the umbel folds inwards and the forked bracts become more obvious. The dried seedheads will often persist throughout the winter, when they look wonderful covered in frost, though they can sometimes become detached and blow around, spreading the seeds, rather like a tumbleweed. The seeds have hooked spines, which stick to animal fur and woolly socks, enabling them to be moved from place to place. See the Microscopy UK website for some lovely and fascinating photos of Wild Carrot umbels at different stages of development. Wild Carrot seeds need a period of cold to break their dormancy and so it’s best to sow them in the autumn.

There are three sub-species of Daucus carota in the British Isles. Wild Carrot, subspecies carota, is widespread in the British Isles, where it grows in grassy places on fairly infertile, well-drained, often calcareous soils. The cultivated Carrot, subspecies sativus, is cultivated and also grows in the wild as a casual on tips and as a relic of cultivation. It has the familiar swollen root. The beautiful Sea Carrot, subspecies gummifer, has stout, almost succulent stems, darker green leaves and is confined to southern and western coasts. Like Cow Parsley, Wild Carrot is also known as Queen Anne’s Lace. Other names include Birds Nest Weed, Bees’ Nest, and Devil’s Plague. The last name seems appropriate for the United States, where Wild Carrot is an introduced noxious weed. Here, the dried seed heads are sometimes considered to be a fire hazard and a threat to the honey industry. North America’s native carrot is the related Daucus pusillus (American Wild Carrot or Rattlesnake Weed).

Sea Carrot, Daucus carota subsp. gummifer, on the Isles of Scilly (with a Six-spot Burnet Moth)

Wild Carrot has a spindly, forked white root, unlike the cultivated Carrot. Carrots were probably domesticated in western Asia. The Carrot Museum website gives a fascinating potted history of the process, which produced today’s fleshy, sweet, pigmented and unbranched edible root.

Carrot colour changed over the years too. The first domesticated Carrots were probably coloured purple with anthocyanins. (Dark red and purple carrots are still grown in Afghanistan today.) At some point mutations occurred to remove the purple pigmentation, resulting in white and yellow varieties of carrots. Most of today’s carrots are orange. Orange carrots are thought to date back about four hundred years. However, there is no documentary evidence to confirm the popular story that orange carrots were developed to honour the Dutch House of Orange. As the Carrot Museum website says: “The orange carrot came first – the Royal family dedication second.”

Carrots are a well-known and popular vegetable and nowadays different coloured carrots are back in fashion – yellow, white, purple with an orange core and completely purple, as well as orange, as well as rainbow seed mixtures. I grow a variety of colours on my allotment. The Plants For A Future website describes Wild Carrot roots as “thin and stringy” but the plants have a variety of medicinal uses and the seed is used as a traditional “morning after” contraceptive. (Beware that the roots of Wild Carrot can induce uterine contractions and so should not be used by pregnant women.) There are even a couple of records of phytophotodermatitis in workers canning carrots during the Second World War, by Vickers (1941) and Peck, Spolyar and Mason (1944). (See also my post on Parsnips.)

Wild Carrot flowers are attractive to many insects, including Common Red Soldier Beetles, Rhagonycha fulva (see my post on Ammi majus). In the south and south-west of England, Rose Chafers (Cetonia aurata, a beautiful, large, metallic beetle) find the flowers irresistible. In June 2010 on the Isles of Scilly I managed to take several photos of these handsome beasts.

Rose Chafers on Wild Carrot, Isles of Scilly