Purple blooms of a drowned girl’s garland
PURPLE loosestrife, lythrum salicaria, is ‘seeding mad’ in Mayo. In Meath it has either come and gone in some places or is awaited in others with curiosity. Last year at this time it was profuse.
Loosestrife’s blooming companion, meadowsweet, filipendula ulmaria, was, by contrast, super-abundant near a monastic ruin where reputedly lie the bones of the Gaelic poet Seamus Dall Mac Cuarta (1647-1733), who worked in the fields here much as the boy Francis Ledwidge was to do a century-and-a-half later.
In medieval times, meadowsweet was gathered in scented bundles for the floors of keeps and castles and humbler dwellings, and also had a useful culinary side in flavouring mead, the ancient honey tipple of chieftains.
This interesting plant has two distinct aromas, sometimes known as ‘courtship and matrimony’, the heady scent of the freshly gathered growth contrasting sharply with that of the crushed foliage. Its botanical name means “hanging on a thread”. Does that refer to marital relations, one wonders, or after a too generous quaffing of mead? Perhaps a combination of both!
I usually halt to gather some stems of both plants in memory of someone who had imparted some morsels of botany to me, much as John McGahern’s mother did for him while walking the Leitrim lanes to school which he describes, movingly, in his autobiographical Memoir.
For some reason I did not do so, perhaps because I was too preoccupied in searching for the tall spikes of magenta flowers of the “long purples” — not Shakespeare’s, but those of a painter hundreds of years later. Let me explain.
The flowers of the tragic Ophelia in “Hamlet” were Early Purple Orchids “that liberal shepherds give a grosser name/ But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them”. But the blooms in John Everett Millais’ famous 1851 painting of the drowning girl are of purple loosestrife. Millais placed a meticulously drawn clump beside the dog rose and willow in his depiction of Ophelia’s watery end.
This came about as he searched for a suitably inspiring location along river banks with his friend Holman Hunt in Surrey. They eventually decided on a spot on the River Ewell with the proper composition of floral and arboreal richness he was seeking. Loosestrife likes damp ditches and watery locations, perhaps more in keeping with the drama of the play than the Bard’s orchids. Millais as a movie-maker, then! It is a stunning painting.
Like many wild plants, loosestrife has other and perhaps more valuable qualities. For centuries it has been highly regarded by herbalists, going back to Pliny the Younger, the Roman botanist, who wrote that it dissolved strife among oxen at the plough and settled restive horses.
The famous Mrs Grieve in her Modern Herbal (1931) traced its provenance to a Sicilian king who found the plant “obnoxious to gnats” and when burnt in households the fumes could drive off insects and snakes. The herbalist Culpeper maintained that it “cureth the eyes and preserved the sight” — a bold claim after those smoky kitchen fires!