viii: Foraging through Folklore
The slow traveller’s joy Ella Leith Always happy to celebrate slowness, for this column I set off down a familiar path. The wrong path, as it turns out. To me, the byname ‘Old Man’s Beard’ refers to Wild Clematis (Clematis vitalba), a climber native to the UK that sprawls all over hedgerows in vast tangled clusters. In the winter, its fluffy white seed-heads give it the name I know it by, as well as the less common name of ‘Father Christmas’. In the summer, its fragrant white flowers are as abundant now as when John Gerard described them in his 1597 Herball, coining another of Wild Clematis’s names: decking and adorning waies and hedges, where people travel; and there upon I have named it the Traveller’s Joy. These plants have no use in physic as yet found, but are esteemed only for pleasure, by reason of the goodly shadow which they make with their thicke bushing and clyming, as also for the beauty of the floures, and the pleasant sent or savour of the same. (quoted in Mabey 1974, 68; spellings as written.) As Traveller’s Joy and as Old Man’s Beard, Wild Clematis has become one of the ‘botanical mascots of footweary wayfarers’ (ibid, 67). An appropriate plant, I thought, to explore for The Slow Issue. And so I meandered, researching Wild Clematis. I learnt more of its bynames: ‘Shepherd’s Delight’, ‘Poor Man’s Friend’. Perhaps these names allude to the same aesthetic and practical attributes described by Gerard: its flowers giving delight to passing shepherds, and its bushy tangles providing welcome shelter from sun or rain for those working outdoors. There is even the claim that beggars used to rub juices from the leaves into scratches on their skin, ‘raising large superficial sores and giving the user an appearance miserable enough to con alms out of the most hard-hearted wayfarer’ (Mabey 1974, 68). But
more likely these names go hand in hand with its other monikers: ‘Boy’s Bacca’, ‘Baccy Plant’ and ‘Smokewood’. In winter, its dry stems would be cut and smoked as a foraged substitute for tobacco— the original wild Woodbine (‘Woodbine’ being a generic name for a creeper). Wild Clematis was also once known as ‘Bed-wind’, presumably alluding to how strongly it winds itself around the supporting hedge or tree; I wondered whether there could be a connection here to old rope beds, since the stems of Wild Clematis have been used in the past to make a rough rope. Winding derives etymologically from the same root as wander… I was enjoying my wandering with Old Man’s Beard. Then I told my mother what I was writing about. “Old Man’s Beard is a lichen, isn’t it?” And so it is. I should be focussing in this Slow Issue on Usnea spp, not Clematis vitalba. I had set off on the wrong path. Oh well. It was a fruitful detour. The words of Edith Sitwell’s poem come to mind: and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest. Usnea’s ‘Old Man’s Beard’ has a different quality to that of Wild Clematis. Whereas Wild Clematis’s seed-heads are light and downy and scatter in the wind ‘like insects on the wing’ (White 1788, quoted in Mabey 1996, 45), Usnea‘s silvery fibres are scratchy and tangled. It is itself very old. Extremely slow growing, a well-developed lichen is likely to have been tenaciously clinging to an old tree or fence post for over a century— but only where the air is pure enough to sustain it. It demands a slow pace of air travel: the ACE/Sunday Times Air Pollution Survey of 1972 observes that ‘the slipstream of cars tends to blast [lichens] off the nearside of trees. In one place they were wiped off above a fence but not below it’ (quoted by Mabey 1974, 136). So, I set off on a new path with this other Old Man’s Beard, catching little glimpses of the old path as I went. Grass Roots Remedies claim
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