A floral lexicon

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine.
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:'

from A Midsummer Night's Dream : Act 2, Scene 1   William Shakespeare

A few months ago I read Olivia Laing's first book To the River in which she describes her walk the length of the river Ouse in Sussex one scorching midsummer week in 2009. It is an enjoyable debut and one that is hard not to describe in riverine metaphors as it leisurely meanders through Laing's varied literary interests, mirroring her earthly journey. Chief among these is Virginia Woolf who drowned herself in the Ouse in 1941 and whose ghost stalks the author's footsteps over the course of the 42 miles from source to sea.

Common Knapweed

The Sussex Ouse is not one of Britain's great watercourses. Gentle and sluggish for the most part it has known moments of violence, Woolf's suicide aside, and has witnessed some turbulent history including devastating floods. The river's name is deliciously onomatopoeic, summoning images of brackish estuarine mud, and Laing speculates on its origin. Ouse is a common name for rivers in England and most likely derives from the celtic usa which simply means water. Its similarity to other river names - the Ure, Aire, Wear, Wyre, Usk, Esk, Isis, Erewash etc - suggests a common ancestor. But there are other theories, foremost among them that the name may derive from La Rivière de Lewes as the major town through which the river flows.

Lady's Bedstraw

However, I digress before I have even started. My chief reason for mentioning Olivia Laing's book is that some of its most bewitching passages recount the wild flowers she encounters as she walks. Laing is knowledgeable about floral botany and she identifies each species with enviable facility, reciting their names with a reverential slowness that falls in with the pace of her footsteps. Riverbanks are rewarding places for flower hunters, offering rich habitat and abundant variety. There are successions that change with soil and shade and season, so a walk among meadows and hedgerows is never the same twice.

In a twenty-first century, urban Britain there is something mysterious and occult about flower names. Like the rivers whose margins they populate they have arcane and ancient origins mostly lost to us. They are words only half-remembered, harking back to a time of monastic herbalists and alchemists, pregnant with lore and liturgical significance. Aconite, agrimony, asphodel... they should be in every serious Scrabble player's arsenal! Shakespeare's fairies knew them all, as quoted above, where Oberon describes in floral terms to the mischievous Puck the place where he might find his Titania sleeping, in order to teach her a lesson about love. Equally, Macbeth's hags might have tossed them into their bubbling cauldron, cooking up a dark magic.

Common Comfrey

Betony, bedstraw, burnet... discovering flowers forces us to slow down, to cease from marching on, to take notice of the smallest detail. Perhaps one day I might stumble upon Titania who there sleeps 'sometime of the night. Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;' Apparently there are more than 140 different plants and flowers referenced in Shakespeare's plays and poems. Some literary historians have cited the wide botanical familiarity in his language as evidence that the Bard did not work alone, that he engaged specialist researchers. I prefer a simpler explanation. He grew up a country lad who wrote at a time when the names of wild flowers were still part of the vernacular, within the vocabulary of common folk. He employs flowers both literally and emblematically and he expects his audiences to be familiar with them and to understand their symbolic significance. 'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance' Ophelia says, and Elizabethan or Jacobean playgoers would at once have heard this as premonitory, for rosemary was thrown onto coffins by graveside mourners.

Devil's-Bit Scabious

Celandine, centaury, comfrey... I lack Olivia Laing's broad knowledge to always identify on the spot what I see. But with the aid of my camera and a bundle of guidebooks I can afterwards hope to put names to most of what I find. It's a pity but to some extent digital photography has supplanted the need for the field notebook and the art of meticulous observation in situ. As I look at the photographs later, from the comfort or confines of an armchair, I am back there walking the riverside path, drinking the aroma of damp earth, hearing the electric crackle of dragonflies, halting every few steps to examine yet another of nature's inexhaustible designs for seducing pollinators. These are a few of my pictures taken on recent river path walks.

Self-heal

Olivia Laing's admiration for tenacious weeds is especially palpable, describing with glee how quickly they re-colonise land laid waste by human vanity or destructiveness. In weeds we find true eternity. 'The rosebay willowherb swells up through the ruins of law courts and cathedrals, the dandelion marches across battlefields and infiltrates the gardens of mansions... these weeds have come and will come again, time immemorial, time without end. It is as well to remember this, for humans believe against all evidence in stasis...' This is wonderful, persuasive writing and I hope to be able to tell her so, for tomorrow I will meet Olivia Laing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Above all I want tell her how much I enjoyed meandering with her along the banks of her chosen river and to thank her for helping me to slow down and expand my floral lexicon.

Knowing your umbels

It has been a soggy June north of the border, following on from one of the wettest Mays on record. Parts of west Scotland recorded rainfall levels of 250% the monthly average. Watching news coverage of parched earth and stunted cereal crops in East Anglia it is sometimes hard to credit we live in the same small isle. On the plus side, nothing grows without rain and it has been a season of rampant growth. Hedgerows, meadows and lanes are ablaze with wild flowers and it is hardly possible to go for a country walk without wading through a strangle of brambles and nettles and tall stems of hogweed with its profusion of white and pinkish flowers.

The unkindly named hogweed is a member of the carrot family, a very large group of mostly white or yellow flowering plants which includes many important culinary species like chervil, cicely, caraway and angelica and others with medicinal properties. Many of them grow to a great size, none more so than hogweed which often reaches shoulder height. The giant hogweed, not native to Britain although widespread here, may tower to ten feet or more.

Typical flat topped umbel of common hogweed

Like most of the carrot family, common hogweed or Heracleum sphondylium bears its small flowers in spoked clusters called umbels (think umbrella). These may be the breadth of a hand span and are typically flat topped and borne high about the stout hollow stems. For novices like myself telling umbelliferous plants apart can be confusing as they may be very variable and the individual flowers are often indistinct. Usually the shapes of the leaves give better clues and fortunately they often grow together, making for easier comparison.

And identification is important, for mixed in among these aromatic herbs and also bearing white umbels are some of the most poisonous plants to be found anywhere, the hemlocks and water dropworts, which are potentially lethal to humans and livestock alike even in comparatively small doses. Some of them are all the more dangerous for being common and all parts of the plants are toxic; leaves, seeds and especially roots. Hemlock poisoning, which causes respiratory paralysis while still conscious, was apparently a favoured means of execution in classical Greece. Its most celebrated victim was Socrates, put to death for his outspoken criticism of Athenian democracy, whose demise is told of by Plato in the Phaedo.

Outermost flowers of each cluster are larger

Common hogweed isn't poisonous, nor is it something you would probably want to try to eat, but it does have a taxonomic name with classical associations, Heracleum. I wonder whether this is simply a reference to its size or whether like Achillea, the yarrow - which Greg wrote so interestingly about- there is some other significance that I am missing.

It is fairly straightforward to identify from the flowers alone. They are often pink when still buds, the ones in the centre of each umbel being the last to open. There are five petals and flowers at the outer edges of the cluster have a pair of larger petals, projecting outwards, shaped rather like miniature fish tails. The flowers are much frequented by insects including bees. They give off a mildly unpleasant scent which I have only really noticed on hot, muggy days when the flowers are very abundant. Hogweed's attraction of insects potentially makes it a valuable companion plant for crops because it may aid pollination or pest control. Certainly it is often found around field edges but I think it unlikely that its seeds have been sown purposely as it is naturally invasive.

I don't suppose hogweed will feature high on the list of favourite wild flowers for many people and I must count myself among them. But I associate it with countless country walks on summer days when the sky is blue and the air is hot and fizzing with insects. And in our current, decidedly unspectacular Scottish summer, that surely can't be bad.

Nothing but flowers

'If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower' David Byrne sung in 1988, a wry twist on Joni Mitchell's eco-anthem 'they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.' 

I grew up in the middle class suburban south east of England, hardly paradise, but it was a privileged place to live. I rarely go there these days but when I do I am reminded how leafy and green it is, in a regimented sort of way. For my childhood circle and me, the local parks and gardens gave us our formative experiences of Nature, carefully pollarded and pruned. For something a bit wilder we had the chalky North Downs a London Country bus ride away. David Byrne writes of America but his clever lyrics in Nothing But Flowers neatly encapsulate our closeted, sanitised dichotomy about all things living. We rather liked Nature, but we didn't understand much about it and we weren't sure it could be trusted. We had it tidily presented to us or else we viewed it from the safe distance of a book or television documentary.

Paradise is an epithet much favoured by tourism promoters. Our planet is remarkably well endowed with Paradise Hotels in Paradise Bays, and when we tire of them there are lively Paradise Clubs on Paradise Boulevards. Paradise, the lifestylists would have us believe, is leisurely and luxurious and, crucially, it is decidely not-here. That is, it's a place we escape to. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for a bit of escape and I am as happy as the next person to put my feet up and take a dose of pampering, but it's a fair bet that any location requiring to be prefaced by 'Paradise' is probably about as far from my idea the Garden of Eden as it is possible to get.

Television advertising has its calendar and right now we are definitely into 'outdoor DIY season'. We are encouraged to proof our sheds and decking with something noxious, to green our lawns and, most pressing of all, to exterminate those bothersome weeds. The language of weedbusting is tough and masculine, the voice as gravelly as the path through which the dastardly invaders are poking. Never fear, there are products out there which will (in bold capitals) KILL THEM DEAD (as if there were some lesser, half-hearted grade of killing). Weeds are to be viewed like viruses. Our mission, nay our duty, is to eradicate them before they overrun the neighbourhood.

Looking back, I'm quite sure weeds were against the law in leafy Surrey in the 1970s. If not quite a criminal offence, then an unkempt garden was certainly sufficient grounds on which to base a character judgement. If a neighbour couldn't keep his privet hedge trimmed or his path free of dandelions who knew what moral lassitude festered behind his front door.

Dandelions, actually, are a good case in point. They are the weed par excellence, singled out for special vilification. They are persistent and prolific. In the competitive world of weed extermination if your product can't deal with the dandelion it's not worth the price. I grew up with an ambivalent attitude to the 'tooth of the lion' (the name is a corruption of the French dent de lion). I told the time by dandelion clocks and the sunny yellow flowers were forever associated with warm spring days. But somewhere, somehow, I had it instilled in me that dandelions were bad. If I touched them the milky sap would blacken my hands and then I would wet the mattress. In fact the culinary and medicinal uses of the dandelion have been exploited for milennia; the flowers make excellent wine and the tap root can be ground into a substitute for coffee with similar purgative and diuretic properties. But in the collective memory of the people responsible for my education these virtues were only partially remembered, corrupted. Not for nothing was the dandelion nicknamed 'piss-a-bed'. Best give them a wide berth and tell the time from a wristwatch.

In other contexts, of course, weeds become wild flowers and then they are to be loved. Coach tours are organised to woodlands carpeted in bluebells and which of us has not cooed from a passing car window at a meadow ablaze with summer poppies or cornflowers? Like the dandelion many of them grow vigorously. They do so precisely because they are meant to be here. This is their home; the soil, the climate, the ecosystem of which they are part suits them just fine and they thrive. And there's the rub, the minute they get inside the garden gate they run amok, outgrowing our tender and temperamental cultivars, our dainty but delicate foreigners.

The trouble with real paradise is that it's all rather unruly, not at all convenient or accessible and not always even very pleasing on the eye or nose. It's overgrown and muddy, full of things that scratch and sting, full of dying and decay. Some things in paradise even poison us, although not as many as Nature's detractors would have us believe. My paradise is riotously filled with dandelions that go unmolested; there are clovers and celandines in the lawn, thistles and ragwort in the paddock and marsh marigolds choking the stream. The lawnmower has happily rusted in the shed that I never proofed and the rain got in. The tour operators would have trouble selling my paradise, but then it's not for sale.

I'll leave the final word to David Byrne: 'This used to be a shopping mall, now it's all covered in flowers.' I wish.