Words of Wisdom: AG archives

WORDS OF WISDOM

From Amateur Gardening’s historic 138-year-old archive

This extract from AG 2 August 1975 looks at wild plants that are ancestors of many vegetables

The sand leek (Allium scorodoprasum) is found mostly in sandy places and on wasteland in northern England and southern Scotland

Wild Parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) with yellow flowers and Wild carrot (Daucus carota) with white flowers flowering on cliff top grassland in Dorset

Vegetables with a pinch of salt

Tony Venison looks at the seashore weeds from which many of our cultivated vegetables are derived, including cabbages, carrots, parsnips and leeks

THERE’S more for the gardener on holiday at the seaside than the band on the prom playing ‘tiddly-om-pom-pom’. If you are planning to visit a seaside resort, why not take the opportunity to become acquainted with some of the ancestors of our better-known vegetables? Not the droopy lettuce leaves (do they never have hearts?) dished up by boarding-house landladies (do they never have hearts?), nor the frozen peas that perpetually appear at meal times. What I am referring to are the wild plants that grow on sand dunes and cliffs around our shores.

Scruffy seashore weeds

Vegetables such as beetroot, seakale and cabbage had their origins in scruffy seashore weeds. Centuries ago man discovered that they were edible, and cooked or stewed them with his meat. Later he took to cultivating them, selecting the finest and improving their quality until these vegetables attained the forms we know today.

Asparagus is another native of coastal

Wild asparagus can be found growing in coastal habitats such as cliffs, sand dunes and shingle beaches

regions and for that reason we dress its beds in gardens every winter with agricultural salt. Whether this practice is really beneficial now seems doubtful. Certainly, wherever I have found asparagus growing in its wild haunts on the Dorset coast and in parts of Cornwall, it appears to relish its regular drenchings with salt sea spray. Shoots of wild asparagus are not really fat enough to cut for cooking, but watch for them on rocky cliff slopes in the south-west.

A much more plentiful plant, found on

From the wild cabbage Brassica oleracea our garden forms of greens were developed

mudflats and foreshores, is the common beetroot (Beta maritima), the leaves of which were gathered and eaten by fishermen until the present century. It is from this plant that our modern varieties of garden beetroot have been bred. Two wild forms exist – one with purplish-red roots and leaves, and the other with yellowish-green colouring, not unlike the herb good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus) to which it is related. Anyone who has let their beetroot run to seed will recognise the 2ft (60cm)

flower spikes of these plants.

Another vegetable whose ancestors inhabit our sandy seashores is the carrot (Daucus carota). Again, two forms exist, one having fleshier leaves than the other, but neither has roots thick or tender enough for cooking.

Why bother about these weeds when we now have much better garden strains of vegetables? The answer is that scientists and plant breeders are now turning to the wild species to reinvigorate our weaker cultivated varieties. Ask yourself which plants survive in an uncultivated garden: the weeds, every time! It is also hoped that certain desirable disease-resistant features can be transmitted from the wild species to garden varieties.

Pungent fennel

Another wild vegetable similar to the carrot, but unmistakable because of its pungent, spicy smell, is fennel. In herb gardens it grows 3-6ft (1-2m) tall, though only half this height in its wild state. Look for it on the south coast, particularly on chalk slopes along the edge of the Downs. Its flat-topped heads of yellowish-green flowers appear in August, but its leaves can be seen before this. A sprig of fennel boiled with fish turns an ordinary cod cutlet into a dish fit for a king.

Wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) lives along inland hedgerows as well as among scrub by the shore. Its flat heads of small yellow flowers are not unlike garden parsnips run up to seed. The Romans are said to have cultivated parsnips, the word parsnip coming from the Latin pasco, meaning ‘I feed’.

Wild leeks are easily recognised by their smell when bruised and are distinguished from wild onions by their flatter leaves. Those in the Channel Islands stand the best chance of finding them, Allium ampeloprasum, while the sand leek, Allium scorodoprasum, is found on more northern shores.

But pride of place must be given to the cabbage tribe, for almost wherever you go within the sound of the waves you should find one or two of their wild ancestors, especially the commonest, Brassica oleracea. This is the parent of all our cultivated brassicas, including the cauliflowers, Brussels sprouts, kales and broccoli. Not that you will be able to recognise the wild plant as any of these, though its flowers should give you a clue for they are yellow and typically like those of a cabbage. The leaves have a familiar blue-grey hue about them, too. The cabbage has been cultivated for a long time. In fact, the brassica family must include one of our oldest Illustration from John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes 1597 depicting the legend that geese were born from barnacles known vegetables for the Saxons named the month of February after one of them, calling it ‘Sprout-kale’. Closely related to the wild cabbage is the seakale (Crambe maritima) and this I am sure you will recognise for it is not very different from cultivated forms. Those visiting the shingle and rocky shores in the south-west will have the most chance of seeing it. At one time young seakale shoots used to be blanched under the sand and then cooked and eaten by villagers. We owe the modern popularity of seakale largely to the Lambeth gardener

Sea beet (Beta maritima) is a quite common seashore ancestor of our presentday beetroot and spinach

and botanist William Curtis, who wrote an enthusiastic pamphlet about its cultivation around 1790. Before that time, seakale was very seldom grown.

‘Vegetable goose’

A more mysterious seaside plant that was recorded many years earlier by the English herbalist John Gerard in 1597 was the ‘vegetable goose or barnacle tree’. Though a plant of the imagination rather than of reality, its existence was believed in by Scottish fishermen well into the 17th century.

The legend arose because certain migratory geese appeared in winter and had no known breeding grounds, but on the shores of the Western Isles of Scotland, where these birds congregated, were found pieces of timber and tree trunks encrusted with a type of shellfish called barnacles.

When the tide was up, these barnacles extended their feathery feelers of cirri in the water. Superstitious fishermen thought that these feelers were the plumage of young sea birds that lived inside the seashells. This solved the problem of where the geese came from and so the legend of the ‘vegetable geese’ grew.

n AG accepts no responsibility for the consequences of any plants foraged and subsequently eaten after reading this article. The photographs on these pages are not intended as a guide to identification.

The views, information and opinions expressed during this series of extracts from past issues of AG are solely those of the individuals involved, at the time they were written, and are not necessarily relevant or even legal today. Please treat these pages as a look back at how things were done in the past and not necessarily how they are done today. AG accepts no responsibility if readers follow advice given in these articles from past issues.