Humble Weeds.

Let’s hear it for the weeds.

Not the Grumbleweeds or the Tumbleweeds but the good old honest humble weeds. Those little plants that, sadly, just happen to be growing in the wrong place.

We pursue them to oblivion with hoe, spade or chemical weapons, whilst pandering to our F1 hybrids and half hardy annuals, yet rarely give a thought to what they actually are. So I decided to photograph one or two, before decapitating them, and look up what they are.

This is one of the Speedwell family. I’m not sure which one as there are so many, but they all belong to the genus Veronica. Named after St Veronica who is supposed to have wiped Christ’s forehead on the way to the cross, and later found his image on the cloth. According to folk lore, you will get your eyes pecked out by birds if you pick the plant ! The name Speedwell is probably to do with the supposed many healing properties of the plant, which included use as a blood purifier, for skin irritation, smallpox, measles, cancer, kidney complaints and just for good measure, it can also be used for sore eyes.

Here we have Shepherd’s Purse. So named because of its delicate triangular seed case resembling a shepherd’s purse of old.. It came originally from southern Europe and western Asia, and those purses are so prolific that it has spread all over the world as far as North America. Again, it has been used medicinally for hundreds of years, mainly as a means of stopping bleeding both internally and externally, for example haemorrhoids !


This little plant is an immature example of the Spear Thistle, and you can already see the needles. When I first got the plot, there were some mature plants that were real monsters, with tap roots that went down to Australia and spikes making it well worthy of it’s name. All parts of the plant are apparently edible, if rather bland, though there wouldn’t be much left after removing those spikes. Fibres from the plant can be used for paper making, and the fluffy seed heads make excellent tinder for fire making. Medicinally, a poultice can be made from it to treat arthritis.

So there we have it, from my little plot I can make some paper or a fire, treat my arthritis, and if the need ever arises, even treat my piles !

Friend or Foe

This last season the whole site was plagued with Cabbage White butterfly, and everyone seemed to suffer no matter what they did. I tried netting all the brassicas with, what I thought, was a narrow enough mesh to keep them out and prevent them laying eggs. However, the day I saw butterflies fluttering in and out of the netting at will, I knew my plan had been foiled and it could only be a matter of time before the caterpillars appeared.

It’s a strange irony that though allotment holders are typically people who appreciate the wonders of nature, they have to deal ruthlessly with it at times. It’s similar to the idea that a weed is only a plant growing in the wrong place, I suppose. One minute you can be enjoying watching these beautiful insects dancing about in the summer sun, and the next be chasing them like a lunatic, with a cane, as they try and lay their eggs on your precious cabbages.

Not that I'm of any religious persuasion that sanctifies the protection of life in all its forms or anything, but it was with a certain reluctance that I had to go round all the plants and destroy any eggs by hand. Funnily enough, I found the netting made the job much more difficult, and don’t think I’ll bother at all with it next season.

I thought I had got them all, then one day when focusing more closely on something strange on a particular plant, I realised with horror that I was looking at a seething mass of caterpillars! As I had decided to not use any insecticides, there was only one thing for it but to literally pick them all off and dispatch them. Not a pleasant job.

The Cabbage White season came and went, and I’d almost forgotten about them, when one day in the shed I noticed a caterpillar stuck to the roof. Ah, an escapee I thought, nicely settling down to pupate, and my first reaction was to destroy it and the others that were there. Then I noticed what I thought were a bunch of eggs attached to it, but something wasn’t quite right, caterpillars don’t lay eggs.


After some googling, the puzzle was eventually solved. The “eggs” turned out to be the tiny larvae of a small parasitic wasp called Cotesia glomerata, that spin a yellow silk cocoon around themselves.

In this picture you can just make out the wasp at the side of the caterpillar.


The wasp parasitizes the Cabbage White caterpillar, by laying it’s eggs in the caterpillar’s body. Then, like something out of a horror movie, the larvae feed on the living caterpillar and eventually emerge to spin their cocoons. What’s more bizarre is that they don’t eat the caterpillar’s vital organs, so that the life of the host is prolonged as long as possible, and they even control the host’s behaviour by causing it to stay with the cocoon cluster.

So now, any that I find in the shed, are left for my new found little friends to do their gory job on.

Isn't nature just wonderful!!!