Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,Īnd he felt in his heart their strangeness, Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, “Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,Īnd his horse in the silence champed the grassĪnd he smote upon the door again a second time She had many favourites, but since we were talking about Walter de la Mare earlier, I shall share with you a rather eerie poem, which still makes a little shiver run down my back. Don’t get me started on blokes who believe they should have dominion over women’s faces as well as everything else.Ī fine crop of white comfrey (Photo Four – see credit below)And talking of my mother reminds me that, when I was a child, she used to recite the poetry that she had learned by heart to me. I believe she ‘cleaned him’ as they say these days. I do remember, however, my mother remarking that when she was wearing black after her mother died back in the 1970’s, some idiot still told her to ‘smile’ when she walked past. I sometimes think we should restore the old habit of mourning clothing, because it provided some indication that the person wearing them might be feeling vulnerable, and I like to think that people would behave accordingly. ‘Weed’ as in ‘plant’ comes from Old English ‘weod’, meaning herb or grass, and only later becoming pejorative.
By 1595 it is used only for the dark mourning clothing of widows, and this is the only sense in English in which we still use the phrase. It was first recorded in 888, but by 1297 it referred to the clothing of a particular kind of occupation or station in life: you could talk about a priest’s ‘weeds’ or a beggar’s ‘weeds’ for example. ‘Weeds’ as in ‘Widow’s Weeds’ comes from the Old English word waed, meaning garment. Is there any etymological relationship between the weeds of a widow, and the weeds that pop up here every Wednesday? And the phrase ‘widow’s weeds’ got me thinking. Well, not exactly a poor old widow, but a fine example of mourning dress nonetheless. Queen Victoria with John Brown by Edwin Landseer, late 1860’s (Photo Three – Credit below) Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,Īnd peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes I would love to make a garden like this one.Īnd down came April - drip - drip - drip. I was brought up with some of his poetry for children, and although some of it now makes my teeth ache, I rather like this one, both for its pun on the word ‘weeds’ and for the contented present life of the widow. White comfrey, from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, published in 1912 (Photo Two – credit below)As you know, I like to weave in some poetry when possible for my Wednesday Weeds, and this week it’s the turn of Walter de la Mare. The flowers discolour rather quickly, unfortunately, as in the plant above. White Comfrey can be told from common comfrey by its snowy white flowers (those of common comfrey are creamy-coloured). It comes originally from north western Turkey, Russia and the Causcasus. White comfrey (also known as ‘soft comfrey’) was introduced into cultivation in this country in 1752, and was found in the wild by 1849.
Who could resist a plant with fertile nutlets, I ask myself, it sounds like just the thing for a vegetarian brunch, maybe with some fried tomatoes and mushrooms.However, some of the sites that I have looked at that sell white comfrey refer to it ‘not spreading, but gently self-seeding’, which could be weasel words in my view: I suspect that once you have one white comfrey, you might find yourself with nutlets to spare.Īnd in case you wondered, each comfrey flower has four nutlets (seeds), which are heart-shaped and dark-brown in colour. Who could resist these plants, with their plentiful food for bees and their varied medicinal uses? Clive Stace describes white comfrey as being ‘surely the most beautiful of it’s genus’, and notes that it is well distributed due to its ‘persistent roots and fertile nutlets’. I have talked about Common Comfrey and Creeping Comfrey in previous posts, and as you might have gathered, I have rather a ‘thing’ for the whole Boraginaceae, a group that includes everything from lungwort to forget-me-nots.
Where do these plants come from? Has it been lurking in the soil for ages, just waiting for its chance? Or did the seed (described rather rudely in my Harraps Guide to Wildflowers as being ‘dull, with minute warts’ ) blow in from some distance? Which ever is the case, there it stands, as lonely as a cloud. White comfrey is not a rare plant, but this individual, leaning through the fence of my friend A’s garden, is the only one that I’ve come across in my half-mile ‘territory’, and it has no friends nearby. Dear Readers, I am often surprised by what ‘pops up’ in the gardens of East Finchley.
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