Rumwoldstow blog – Page 10

A miraculous poppy, and the mysteries of woundwort

We have in the garden at Rumwoldstow, a miraculous poppy! I planted one little opium poppy plant, honest, which has thrived, but one stem is determinedly producing different flowers from the rest of the plant – lovely red frilly ones instead of the usual rather meh (in my opinion) pink of the opium poppy.

I’ve also been puzzling over the identification of some of the wildflowers in the orchard. There are two different plants with small purple flowers, one which came up earlier in the year and one which is now in flower. I fell into some confusion between the two, having previously identified the latter as self-heal but not realising initially that the earlier flower is not the same thing.

And then I found hedge woundwort in the orchard, which added to the confusion as self-heal is also known as woundwort. I did some googling yesterday (with thanks to Saint Isidore of Seville) and found that the plant I thought to be self-heal is indeed also called self-heal and woundwort.

I think I have it straight now, but I felt a strong sense of connection with Carl Linnaeus and really understood why he developed his system of plant classification – by all that’s holy, just have one name for one plant, and group them in families rather than giving a similar name to a completely different plant!

Glechoma hederacea: common name ground ivy (no it isn’t an ivy, yes Carl I hear your pain; it’s a member of the mint family Lamiaceae). Anglo-Saxon names include hōfe, tūnhōfe. It was used to flavour ale.
Prunella vulgaris: common names self heal, heal-all, woundwort. Anglo-Saxon names may include brūn-wyrt but the references are not clear – there are many possibilities. Allegedly edible, I must try it.
Stachys sylvatica: common name hedge woundwort. It is not clear to me whether the Anglo-Saxons had a use for this plant. They may have preferred Stachys officinalis (a.k.a. Betonica officinalis) for medicinal use, which they knew as betonie.

Flowers and anticipatory plants

On the plus side, the garden at Rumwoldstow has flowers! The two pot marigolds (orange) are vast and lush. The rosa gallica has beautiful deep pink blossoms with a rich scent. The coriander is flowering and again scenting the area, while the valerian diagonally opposite is having a good go at competing on scent. The cornflower – yes that’s just one plant! – has gone made and is taking over the world. The opium poppy has pink flowers and one completely different frilly red flower on the same plant. The peony didn’t like being transplanted and is Not Flowering but also Not Dead, so I’ll take that. And four of the six iris germanica have flowered, which I think is pretty good for their first year in the ground. The borage is just starting to flower, and for reasons I can’t fathom there is a random borage 100m away in the home garden, where I absolutely didn’t plant it! The lovage is just starting to come into flower. It’s about 60cm high but the lovage in the home garden which wasn’t transplanted must be over 2 metres. So I expect the Rumwoldstow lovage will get a lot bigger. The thyme is also flowering and the chamomile looks like it’s starting to make flower buds. The white horehound has tiny wee flowers but the bees love them.

On the down side, the fact that we still haven’t sorted out the paths is really showing oh lord the weeds…I have a tentative plan to level the ground a little better and apply hoggin (aka self binding gravel) but a lot of weeding needs doing first.

You see that pale rectangle on the ground to the right of the picture? That’s the base for the planned fifth bed where I intend to plant more utilitarian plants. Chris the stonemason has finally said he’s free to start work next week! Accordingly, I went to the National Herb Centre and bought a stash of plants against the day the bed is ready – I wanted to make sure of having the plants this season. I’ve potted them all on as it’ll probably be a month or two before the bed’s fully cured and filled with soil.

I originally asked the shop for:

tansy
feverfew
hyssop
rue
betony
aconite
dyer’s madder
ladies’ bedstraw

They replied that they had everything except tansy and aconite. I don’t mind too much about the aconite (monkshood) as it’s jolly toxic, but I’ll look out for tansy at a later date. I trundled up to collect the plants and also took a turn round the lovely garden centre.

At the end of the day, because of a few mixups one way and another, I ended up with both rue (ruta graveolens) and goat’s rue (galega officinalis), but fortunately the latter is also an Anglo-Saxon plant and completely different – I’ve no idea why they share a name. There is also a spare alecost (tanacetum balsamita) which I’ll have to find a home for somewhere in the main garden, or give away – I already have two in the square beds!

A lovely Tudor re-enactor has already given me wormwood and southernwood, so those are also in pots waiting for their home to be built and furnished. Oh, and I had already picked up a lady’s bedstraw at the local garden centre.

Goat’s rue (left), rue (right). Separated at birth? You decide. (Ignore the betony far right)

Rock Hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis ss aristatus)

The hyssop is a subspecies, Rock Hyssop or Hyssopus officinalis ss aristatus which is apparently more compact. I don’t know its history as a plant but suspect it’s not quite the one the Anglo-Saxons would have known

Lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum) – found at the local garden centre!

Golden feverfew (tanacetup partienium “Aureum”). Again, I don’t know how far this subspecies may be from the earlier type?

Southernwood (Artemisia abrotanum) and wormwood (Artemisia absinthium)

All told, a great haul and I’m doing my best to cherish them until they can go out into Rumwoldstow garden.

The colours

Some of the plants are beginning to show their colours – red roses, blue cornflowers, yellow marigolds and purple iris. The roses have a lovely rich scent as you’d expect from a real traditional rose, as does the white valerian.

And yes, there is a lot of work needs doing to weed and gravel the paths…

Heartsease

The heartsease are flowering, they look great! The viola tricolor is the wild progenitor of the cultivated pansy. There is alas no secure identification of heartsease in Anglo-Saxon literature, but it’s a lovely native wild flower with a history of medicinal use, so it’s probably reasonable to include it.

The main Rumwoldstow garden is really starting to fill out – I can see that next year I may need to remove some plants, or find them other homes – the oregano for example is disappearing under the opium poppy, even though it’s doing pretty well in itself.

The asparagus plants in the Bed of Brother Julian are starting to come up. Subsequent to this photo, I’ve scattered sheep droppings around them and then layered lawn cuttings on top, with a sprinkling of soil at the end. T’internet tells me that sheep droppings are great for asparagus but that they may burn the plants. As these were fairly dry I hope they will be OK, and have tried to keep them from touching the actual plants. Fingers crossed!

Asparagus is another questionable plant. It was definitely used medicinally, and it’s hard to see why the Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have eaten the tasty shoots, but we don’t have firm evidence of this. It may be that the earlier varieties weren’t so good to eat.

Mid-May garden updates

Two frosts this week means no plums or damsons, and maybe no pears. But the medlar is in full flower, here’s a picture from a few days ago. The flowers are white and a bit like a wild rose.

The madonna lilies are all up! The third one is still a tiny sprout and the second has a mystery companion which seems to be some other kind of bulb. Was it in the soil below, in which case it’s come up a long way? Or was it somehow stuck to the lily bulb? I may investigate in the winter but for now I’ll let it do its thing and hope that it will reveal its nature some time.

Trio of lilies, with mystery companion, also finger (I’m rubbish with cameras)

I still have some spare skirret seedlings and somebody a few villages over wants them, so today I potted them up, carefully separating the little seedlings. I planted them too close together because I had no confidence in the germination rate, which in the event was very good. Fortunately they seem to be tough little critters. They are now four to a pot and I hope will be fairly easy to plant out once they’re bigger. I still have 16 seedlings left for myself and will have to dig out some space for them real soon now.

I confess, I potted up the biggest seedlings and gave up on the final tiny four which have gone into the hedge and do not appear in this picture.

My grapevine arrived in the post today! All good monasteries should have a grapevine. I chose a Van Der Laan white grape, a Dutch variety which is apparently a reliable fruiter even in the UK and suitably hardy. Planting that out in the Bed of Julian cheered me up some. If it flourishes, we could go Greek and try stuffed vine leaves, maybe with Anglo-Saxon fillings?

It’s between the rhubarb (yeah I know, but it had to go somewhere) and the asparagus, which is still hiding.

Newly planted Van Der Laan grape vine (just pretend you can’t see the rhubarb)

Here’s the other end of the Bed of Julian with two Nine Star Broccoli plants in netting to keep off butterflies, and mama skirret with some babies around her. The broccoli is a perennial that should last four or five years and produce cut-and-come-again mini cauliflowers, with the leaves being edible also. The variety seems to date from the early twentieth century¹.

The Anglo-Saxons has plenty of words for various brassicas, though obviously they wouldn’t have grown this variety. I don’t know how they’d have dealt with caterpillar infestations though – I think people didn’t actually know that caterpillars and butterflies were connected, so they’ll have had no idea how to prevent the eggs being laid. There’s so much knowledge that we take for granted now but that was utterly non-obvious for hundreds, maybe thousands of years prior to microscopes and leisured scientific observation.

A bitter wind

Alas. One late frost, in early May, and the damsons and plums are gone. There are one or two left, but most are now sad shrivelled brown splodges instead of the firm swelling green fruits of a week ago. The farmer’s life is hard – imagine the disaster when this is your livelihood. No photos as it’s too depressing!

What did the Anglo-Saxon orcharder do? Did she shroud the trees in straw or cloth or something when it looked like being frosty?

The pears have suffered too, but I think there are still some left, and the older apple tree may be OK. The quince still seems to have tiny fruits, and the medlar is flowering and apparently perfectly happy. But I grieve for my little damsons.

The only comfort is that I now have no fear of my young trees exhausting themselves by over-producing fruit while still only two years old.

As I walked out one afternoon in May…

After several days of rain, the weather has cleared up and the garden is coming on well. The photo below is taken from the cloister looking at the not-so-pretty side of the garden. The newest planting is the valerian, which is at the left end of the nearest bed, the one with the little roof. It’s fixing to flower soon.

At last, there is a sign of life from one of the Madonna lily bulbs which I planted several weeks ago. It’s late in the season to plant them and I don’t expect great flowers this year but at least something has started to come up. I have been determinedly not allowing myself to dig down and see what’s happening…

Rejoicing in a miracle

Did I mention that over the winter, all four doors to the outbuilding rooms swelled in the unprecedented damp and wouldn’t open for six months? And that after the rain finally stopped, in mid March, brother Alf kept trying the doors and seeing how they were beginning to shift in their frames. Finally the left-most door opened (which meant Al could get into the storeroom and get hold of his good drill at last!)…then the next left…then the third door…but the last door to the planned scullery remained firmly sealed shut. Woes! Brother Alf optimistically foretold that it would open at Easter, as a miracle. Good Friday…Easter Sunday…went past. But on Easter Monday the door opened, and Al has been able to get to work fitting out the scullery.

About a kilometre from Rumwoldstow, my nose alerted me to a fine cluster of wild garlic by the brook. I only hope mine will do as well in the garden. I’m a bit worried about it getting too hot – the sunhat doesn’t entirely protect it.

I planted eight pots of skirret seeds that I collected last year, and four pots have germinated well. When they’re a bit bigger, I plan to very gently try and separate the strongest and move them into the pots of failure. Only the strongest skirrets can make it in Rumwoldstow!

A kind neighbour gave me some dwarf french bean plants. The Anglo-Saxons ate various kinds of beans, I don’t know how similar they were to anything we’d recognise but at least it is beans. In return I gave her a spare garlic bulb from those I planted the previous day, mostly around the rose in the monastery garden as I’ve been told this will help keep off greenfly.

The garden’s filled out a bit but there is still no sign of the three madonna lilies which I planted in the bare area behind the mug. I am so far resisting the temptation to excavate and see if they’re sprouting at all…but it’s hard! What there is, is lots of bindweed shoots. Some are growing from bits of root we didn’t manage to sieve out when filling the beds, and some is in the plants like the fennel that I transplanted. I’m pulling out each sprout as I see it, and hope that eventually they’ll give up.

Green beans potted up (in the home garden, not Rumwoldstow)

I just had to check on the sheep…yep, still there!

Back in the orchard the dandelions are turning into clocks. But people won’t have called them clocks back in Anglo-Saxon times! I wonder what they did call them? The quince is in full flower and just starting to look as though it may be setting fruit.

I dug out some of the dock and nettles to give the comfrey which I transplanted into the orchard a bit more light and space. It’s looking pretty healthy, and I hope that once it’s established it’ll be able to hold its own.

Finally I took about a metre off one of the young damson trees, the one which is reaching for the sky. It still looks pretty tall. I used the very fine lopper on a stick which you operate by pulling a string. I’ll probably take a bit more off next year as I want all the fruit trees to stay fairly low so we can pick the fruit.

Spring lambs on the meadow

Now that Lake Meadow has dried out and the grass has started to regrow, the local farmer has moved a small flock of sheep down there. Particularly adorable are the four hand-reared lambs, who love a bit of attention.

The local kites are nesting in a tree nearby after driving crows off their nest. I assume they’re interested in the health of the lambs below…but not in a good way…

The medlar is still not in bloom, but has many tightly-closed roselike buds. And here is one last photo of the sheep, because sheep.

A minor pilgrimage

I walked to Walton Grounds, about 2km south of Rumwoldstow, which is recorded as being the birthplace of St Rumwold and historically had a chapel dedicated to that infant saint.¹ ²

There is still a hamlet of a handful of houses, to the side of the private road which leads to the farm on the other side of the brook. No trace survives however of the chapel or earlier settlement.

View of Walton Grounds from the south side of the brook

The walk back to Kings Sutton gives a fine view of the church spire. If there was a real minster here in early mediaeval days – and there may well have been – it will most likely have been up on the hill and essentially part of the church. We’ve sited Rumwoldstow down by the meadow, in a fictional Roman fort, because all the high up land is already thoroughly occupied!

Back to the garden – and the borage seedlings are up!