Wildflowers NOT Weeds

What is the difference between a weed and a wildflower? What is a weed anyway? Does it really exist? Eanna Ní Lamhna sets the record straight.

Is a potato a weed? It most certainly is not when a farmer is growing a crop of them in his field. The more he has of them the better. But what if he has planted wheat in that same field the following year and a few un-gathered potatoes grow into plants and come up in the middle of the crop of wheat? Well then, these are now weeds among his wheat. And that is exactly what a weed is. It is a plant that grows in the wrong place and must be got rid of. Describing plants as weeds is only done by farmers and gardeners. 

Is a dandelion a weed? Many would say it is and that it should be got rid of; in other words dandelions should be extinct. Unless of course we come to learn where the right place for a dandelion is. Fanatical gardeners wish them all banished from their sterile green useless (for biodiversity, that is) lawns. But dandelions are native wild flowers whose habitat is grassland, as indeed are daisies and buttercups. They provide lots of food in the form of pollen for our early foraging bees who collect it on their back legs to bring home to feed baby bees. They also provide lovely, sweet nectar, food for adult bees and butterflies and hoverflies and lots of other hungry insects who accidentally pollinate the flowers they visit in search of this lovely food.

Our soils contain a great deal of seeds of all sorts of plants. Just bring a shovel of bare soil indoors in a flower pot, keep it moist and watch all the things growing that you never planted there. So outside in your garden soil are the seeds of many of the plants that grew in that area over the years. Indeed some can last up to sixty yeas in the soil. If you now have a lawn there, the grass prevents many of these plants from growing and the lawnmower finishes off any that dare to stick up their heads. 

So the single best thing you can do to encourage biodiversity in your garden is to stop mowing the lawn – or at least a part of it and watch what wild flowers emerge.

Dandelion

This is a classic rosette plant with its growing point protected by the leaves; so the more you mow it the more it grows. It goes by the common name of Pissybeds; misinterpreted as you will wet the bed if you pick the flowers. What is true is that the leaves act as a diuretic if eaten and were used as a cure for dropsy, fadó. The Irish name is caisearbhán which means bitter stem. Its juice is alkaline and can be used to cure warts. Its long tap roots when dried out make a form of bitter ‘coffee’, its yellow flowers make good wine and very young clean leaves can be eaten in salads. Weed indeed.

Daisy 

Another rosette grassland plant, whose leaves thrive on mowing. The English name means Day’s Eye and the Irish one Nóinín reflects the fact that the daisy flowers are late in the morning to open and close up early in the evening. Collecting daisies for daisy chains is one of the great pleasures of childhood.

Buttercup

This yellow flower can’t tolerate mowing and won’t flower on a mowed lawn but soon will when you leave an unmowed patch. Fields being grazed by cattle are often full of buttercups. The English name comes from the erroneous belief that butter was yellow because cows ate the yellow flowers and turned the butter yellow. If you actually watch cows grazing in a field, they eat everything EXCEPT the buttercups. They don’t like their acrid taste, which is why there are so many left in the field. One of the Irish names for buttercup, Fearbán, reflects this. And one shining under your chin does not indicate that you like butter. Any bright yellow object held under your chin will give a golden reflection – especially on a bright sunny day.

Clover

We have three common types of clover subdued under our terribly grassy lawns – red clover, white clover and yellow clover. These are the colours of the flowers they bear during the summer months. The Irish word for clover is Seamair. In March, when it is young and just beginning to grow, it has no flowers. It is young clover – Seamair Óg – which we all proudly sport on our lapels on the national feast on 17th March. There is no actual special plant called shamrock; it is just young unflowering clover, most likely yellow clover. Bumble bees love clover, particularly red clover and it is a very important food source for them.

Poppy

Poppy is one of our very few red wild flowers. Bees cannot see red and do not visit red garden flowers such as roses, tulips, peonies. Poppies are wide open with ultra-violet lines, which bees can see very well, guiding them in to the sources of food deep in the flower. The seeds of poppies can lie undisturbed for many decades and will only flower when a cutting is made in the soil. So when, during World War One, the numerous casualties were buried in plots newly dug for graves the poppies flowered because of the soil disturbance.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row. 

So the poppy as a remembrance of the horror of war was in the first place an ecological consequence. 

Ribwort

Do you remember playing soldiers as a child? Yourself and your opponent armed yourselves with a stout soldier – a stem of ribwort with a good stout head – and took turns at trying to knock the head off the other players plant. Ribwort is so-called because of the parallel lines or veins in the rosette shaped leaves. It was once thought that these were placed there by the Almighty as clues as to what part of the body the plant would cure (the Doctrine of Signatures). These lines looked like ribs and so this plant could cure ailments of the ribs. Sadly, this is not true.

Selfheal

This lovely purple flower on top of a square stem will grow on your lawn if you give the lawnmower its holidays for a while. The flowers come out at the end of May and the plant continues to flower until the end of September. The English name tells us that this plant played a very important role in the days when people had to get all their medicines from plants they could collect. They used this for heart complaints and gave it to children to rid them of worms. You wouldn’t catch people in those days wantonly mowing and destroying such a useful plant indeed. 

Docks and Nettles

But what if you only get docks and nettles when you stop mowing? Well, this is because there is far too much phosphate in your soil. Irish soils are not short of phosphates or indeed nitrates either, all added to encourage the growth of greedy grasses. So nutrient demanding plants like nettles and docks can grow here very well. Mind you the nettle has a noble history. They were traditionally gathered (using gloves) early in the year when they are young to make a soup full of vitamins, and the stings vanish entirely in the cooking. The stalks contain strong fibre which used to be gathered, extracted and woven into cloth in Ireland since Bronze Age times. And of course, they are the essential food plant for the caterpillars of the lovely peacock, and small tortoiseshell butterflies. 

If you make your soil less rich by removing the top sod and soil and adding sand, it will put manners on these nutrient-grabbing plants including grass, and give the dormant wild flowers in the soil a chance to shine. Go for it.