A Life with Flora Connie Doxat speaks to botanist and writer on plant folklore, Roy Vickery about his memories growing up exploring the flora of the Marshwood Vale
W
hen I arrive, Tooting Common appears nothing more than a pleasant patch of greenery; a place where locals come to escape the hustle of South London. After joining Roy Vickery on a guided plant-walk, however, this slice of scrubland feels like a teeming and exotic jungle. Over an hour, Roy shared snippets of his wisdom on the plants here and their weird and wonderful folklore as we meandered across grasses and woodland. Roy has built-up his encyclopaedic knowledge over a lifetime dedicated to collecting, writing and sharing information on plant-lore and botany. For over 40 years, he worked at the Natural History Museum; beginning as a scientific assistant in the Lichen Section in 1965, and then moving to the General Herbarium, where he was in charge of the curation of around three and a half million specimens of flowering plants. He has also served as a vicepresident of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, and on the committee of both the Folklore Society and the Society for Folk Life Studies. Although he retired in 2007, Roy is still active, frequently giving talks and guided urban walks on the array of plants most of us brush past without even realising. He has also written several books on the subject, most recently Vickery’s Folk Flora, a fantastic and extensive work mapping the folklore of British and Irish plants from A-Z, charting the staggering cornucopia of local names, herbal remedies, traditional customs, riddles, legends and uses of them through history. Currently, Roy also remains a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum and is President of the South London Botanical Institute. Despite living in London for over 50 years now, Roy tells me how his obsession with flora spawned from a childhood
spent roving the leafy depths of the Marshwood Vale. ‘My first flowering encounter was inauspicious; I picked some flowers of herb-Robert, brought it indoors and placed it in a jam jar, where to my disappointment it rapidly shed its petals. I went on to have a quiet appreciation for herbRobert for as long as I can remember. I’m intrigued by the smell when its crushed; it’s difficult to categorise whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. Some people detect the odour of foxes and hence it developed the term fox-geranium as one of its 130 local names. Alternatively, in Cumbria it was known as death-come-quickly, possibly relating to the rapid shedding of its petals, and it was said that if children picked the flowers one of their parents would die. In County Cavan, people boiled and then drank the resulting liquid of the plant to treat kidney trouble’. Roy was born in March 1947 in an almost tumbledown cottage on the Sadborow estate, where the Dorset, Somerset and Devon borders converge just outside Thorncombe. He tells me the cottage was primitive; actually condemned unfit for human habitation, it was brought back into use following the post-war housing shortage. Roy’s father was a tenant farmer on the estate and so from an early age he remembers being encouraged to help on the farm. He recounts one of his more minor tasks as a young boy collecting goosegrass, or cleavers, to feed to the young turkeys in a bid to bolster their poor immunity—a remedy that he has not come across elsewhere, although the use of stinging nettles for such purpose was widespread. Other than Roy’s younger brother Roger, children of his age were thin on the ground when they were growing up; ‘Looking back we had a very isolated, rural childhood really. I guess it was due to this social isolation that I had to make
