The skin was pretty hard to cut, I had to get my sharpest knife.

I’d grown this cucurbit for a few years, always admiring its resilience and ability to scale the trees in my garden.

The thought was this: I can’t really grow bottle gourds in my climate, but I’ve proven that Sharkfin melon loves this damp place, so why not re-purpose the shell as a water container.

This then rapidly evolved to using it as a plant pot.

So I present to you, a Chocolate Mint in Sharkfin Melon Plant Pot.

I don’t know how well the shell will deal with the dampness, but it’s a delightful sight compared to the usual heartless plant pots.

What’s the most unusual thing you’ve repurposed as a plant pot?

I bumped into an unfamiliar flower on a familiar walking route the other day and I wanted to make a quick note about it.

It’s Tragopogon pratensis, or possibly T. minor, but either way it’s in the delightfully named goatsbeard (salsifiy) family. The Wikipedia article has this casual throwaway sentence in it:

The roots can be boiled and eaten like potatoes.

I mean, you just can’t drop that kind of sentence and not talk about the implications. Goatsbeard just grows out in the meadows. What about the potential for domestication? How about we have a polyculture of Silverweed and Goatsbeard, then we just take a shovel and harvest spadeful after spadeful of excellent food?

Has anyone tried this plant?

I have a two year old Poncirus trifoliata (Citrus trifoliata) lemon tree that I’m currently torturing on a windy, north facing fence. If it manages to grow past the fence, it can get a pretty decent day long sun. I’m looking forward to talking to guests about home grown (pithy) lemons.

In the back garden, there’s a pomegranate tree that I will only ever get foliage from. If climate change accelerates, there’s an off chance I can get fruit. This tree is six years old now. It’s looking happier nowadays, but still no flowers despite the south facing aspect.

The last plant I want to show you is my cast iron plant, Aspidistra elatior, which was put outside in a last bid effort to revive it after being house bound since its inception. It’s been sheltered outside all winter in a rickety cold frame but has been out for a few months. It loves being outside - having an actual ecosystem in the soil rather than sterilised substrate helps too. I’ve seen examples of this plant in the wild in warmer countries, but it’s nice that it can survive outside with minimal help.

What plants are you pushing beyond their comfort zone? What are your motivations? For me, I just like talking about plants.

In between my last post about these mutants and now, it’s been about one month. In that time period, the original mutant died back completely. I’d given up hope but then last week I noticed some green. Fast forward to now and we’ve got a strong looking Silverweed plant coming up.

My main question is whether it’s shrugged off my chemical meddling. There’s two quite different looking leaves in this photo. On the right, the leaflets don’t have any serations on the edges. The venation is also less marked. Time will tell.

In other news, I wanted to show off part of my mini forest garden for which this substack is named after.

No, it’s not some lawless jungle. There are rules. Let me list the edible plant species in this photo. There’s an apple tree which everything sits underneath. The herbaceous plants include: Silene dioica, Rumex obtusifolius, Malva (unknown sp.), Mentha suaveolens, Artemisia abrotanum, Rudbeckia laciniata, Symphytum × uplandicum 'Bocking 14', Brassica oleracea (wild collected, 2m tall), Helianthus tuberosus, Origanum vulgare, Solanum dulcamara, Argentina anserina, Allium schoenoprasum.

I think there’s more but I’m not in the garden right now. I just put everything close together and do some judicious pruning if one plant tries to smother another (usually, it’s the Comfrey with its ridiculously large leaves) or the applemint which gets a little tall.

It’s all one big (dys)functional family, and I’m just a caretaker.

I keep a mildly obsessive lookout for unusual plants wherever I happen to be. In my neighbourhood I like to think I’m acquainted with every type of stubborn weed that grows up between pavement cracks and out of the mortar in a crumbling wall. So when I spot one I don’t immediately recognise, my dog sits there and wonders why I’m fixated on this weird plant when there’s a cat she can chase on the next driveway.

The most recent example of this stopped me dead in my tracks, a splash of yellow and green. Looking closer, what appears to be a variegated maple sapling. I am not super-sure if it’s a sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus); my tree identification skills are lacklustre.

If you search around online, these fancy variegated sycamores sell for a high price (2 to 3 year old tree fetching north of sixty pounds stirling).

And here is one, growing between the crack of my wall and a pavement in my local neighbourhood.

I’m starting to think that areas like this - waste ground, high mineral content pavement cracks etc - stress out seedlings and cause weird mutations.

I believe the fancy kinds are all cloned from cuttings, so if this little guy survives any weeding I’ll be coming for it with some scissors in the autumn.

• Potentilla crantzii (Alpine Cinquefoil)

• Potentilla erecta (Tormentil)

• Potentilla indica (False Strawberry)

• Potentilla nepalensis (Nepal Cinquefoil)

• Potentilla neumanniana (Spring Cinquefoil)

• Potentilla recta (Creeping Cinquefoil)

And the Silverweed I’ve had a go at number only two:

• Argentina anserina (Common Silverweed)

• Argentina pacifica (Pacific Silverweed)

Of the Cinquefoils, Alpine Cinquefoil did not naturalise and Spring Cinquefoil did not like my microclimate. A pity about Alpine Cinquefoil because I nutured it from a baby and it survived strongly for two years before dying off completely without any children.

Of the Silverweeds, I had zero germination from Pacific Silverweed but sent some seeds to a nursery who managed to bring up seven starts.

The tormentil has established nicely underneath a dwarf oak in my front garden but is far less vigorous than I thought it would be. I also have a potted sample for future hybrid experiments. Despite the tiny flowers, it and Nepal Cinquefoil’s blooms produce the most pollen.

False Strawberry, P. indica, was transplanted from a friend’s garden into a shady flower bed. It is engaged in a complicated N-way war with Sweet Woodruff (Gallium odoratum), Caucasian Spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides), Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna) and others. The crunchy, large, tasteless fruit is always fun to see and eat. You can see it forming from very early on.

I decided to plant out some Creeping Cinquefoil (Potentilla erecta) underneath my fig tree and Asian pear tree last autumn. Just waiting for this one to explode out of control (in a good way). I rescued this sample from the gravel of a footpath a few miles from my house. No idea how it was getting any nutrient. It has responded well to actual soil.

And obviously, Common Silverweed is just growing up everywhere. I’ve completely lost track of what I planted and what has self seeded and what has creeped to where, but that’s fine. I see all types of phenotypes, including an albino one. The other day I pulled a small storage root straight from some loose soil and cooked it into my lunch.

If you think there’s another Silverweed or Cinquefoil I’m missing, please leave a comment. Especially if there’s another Silverweed because I think there’s only two that are not impossible to get ahold of.

What am I trying to achieve by collecting all these Silverweed and Cinquefoil? I don’t know.

I just like collecting them.

I like getting to know them like old friends, their characters and quirks and likes and dislikes.

Read that article if you’d like, I did spend a lot of time on it and I think it genuinely has some original stuff that even an LLM can’t (yet) dig out of the dark corners of the webs.

I just wanted to keep up this small but more frequent article posting pattern. I think I have smaller thoughts more often than bigger thoughts, so maybe it will all work out.

My last post talked about the unfathomable virtues of my paving slabs for breeding wildly different Silverweed phenotypes, and I wanted to just show the world what I think is a self-seeded Potentilla nepalensis I levered up from those same slabs last year.

Outstanding characteristics include: darker green leaves, deeper venation, more leaflets on each leaf.

It has occurred to me that this may be some spontaneous hybrid. In my garden last year I had P. crantzii, P. recta, P. erecta, P. indica, P. reptans, A. anserina (silverweed). I am babying this plant through to bloom and crossing my fingers that there’s some P. reptans blood in there somewhere.

I could be wrong, but I don’t mind. Hybrids are great, but I’ve recently been discovering the joy of spontaneous self-seeding.

I’m also naturally very curious, and I’ve noticed that I’ve been “talking” to LLMs a lot. I ask them questions like: “What genus of plant contains only edible species?”, “What is difference between two obscure subspecies of <insert plant/animal”, “Research viable rootstocks for Japanese Flowering Quince”. The questions and answers flow like a never-ending fountain, and I have learned more than I have more quickly than I ever have in the last few months.

I like to think I have good questions, and I’ve maybe been kidding myself that I fact-check the LLM output.

All this to say, I’ve been pondering what the future of this substack is in light of this newest pseudo-AI development.

suggested that I write off the cuff, spontaneously, pressing “publish” straightaway. It’s something I’ll flirt with anyway. I definitely get burned out easily from researching things like the edibility of Buddleja.

Anyway, back to regular Silverweed thoughts.

You’ll hopefully remember that my last report talked about mutating Silverweed stolons with caffeine. I’m here to report that one of the two mutated stolons survived (the other slowly produced smaller and smaller leaves until it withered away). Compared to the parent (which has also withered away!), the mutant baby has less serrated leaves, plus, each leaflet is spaced further apart.

I have questions about vigour (there doesn’t seem to be much) in the mutant. I will have to baby this thing if I want to mutate it again.

In related news, perhaps I should not bother with any silverweed breeding and let my paving slabs do the work. There’s something about the conditions there that have attracted a plethora of different Silverweed phenotypes.

If you look very carefully, you’ll see a an albino Silverweed (Whiteweed) in the centre of one of the photos. This isn’t some random transitory thing, this paving slab had a half albino last year too.

Until next time.

I decided to compile a related list of my favourite Potentilla common names. Plants in the Potentilla family are also known as the Cinquefoils. They often have five leaflets per leaf, but can range from three to fifteen leaflets. Common Silverweed used to be in the Potentilla family before they were split off into the underwhelmingly named Argentina family. Potentilla derives from the Latin potens which means strong, and the suffix -illa which means small or diminutive. It’s my favourite genus name.

Before we begin, you might ask what I’m using as a source for these common names. Luckily for me, the iNaturalist species list for Cinquefoils has this covered. There’s also another list here.

1. Seven-leaved Cinquefoil

Potentilla heptaphylla

An iron name, my best of the bunch. At least there are actually seven leaflets or this would just be plain ridiculous.

2. Tormentil

Potentilla erecta

Most Potentilla follow the pattern of “Adjective” Cinquefoil but Tormentil bucks this trend. The common name derives from the latin tormentila (“minor pain”) as it was used for a lot of minor ailments in part due to its high tannin content.

3. Pretty Cinquefoil

Potentilla pulchella

Just in case you don’t agree, the common name insists this Cinquefoil is pretty. The middle leaflet has five leaflets, so if you squint it still fits the five-leaf category. This plant changes form dramatically depending on location.

4. Fan-leaf Foil

Potentilla flabellifolia

Beautiful poppy-like flowers, elegant fan-shaped leaves, what’s not to love?

5. Bigflower cinquefoil

Drymocallis fissa syn. Potentilla fissa

This one is a cheat entry due to reclassification but I love the bold name. I think fissa is vulgar latin for party or holiday.

Nutrient dense food is hard to obtain. As a society, we have collectively broken our backs, then the backs of our machines, to get our hands on high calorie food. As my friend likes to taunt me with, “most weeds are rabbit food”. Now, I don’t take these kinds of comments lying down and I’ll probably consider anything that moves, so when I was stood on my sodden English lawn, pondering about mud it occurred to me that there might be abundance of sustaining food below my squelching feet.

Yes, that’s right. Earthworms. You can turn away now if you want.

The way I see it, worms are pretty much nature’s equivalent of the Peperami (or Slim Jim) if you’re American. Just (processed) meat, though in this case, it’s encased in a nice jacket of soil.

Pound for pound, or gram for gram, earthworms are higher in protein than beef. Of beef, pork, egg, salmon and chicken, only chicken has a comparable protein percentage.

I’ve made similar claims about carbohydrate and silverweed (versus the potato), but don’t worry, I’m only just beginning to muse about the hybridisation of different earthworm species…

When I was younger, I heard rumours that some people ate earthworms medicinally but I discounted this fact until very recently. There’s all kinds of medicinal compounds in worms which you’ll likely lose if you process them into a flour for the fainthearted. And I do mean that: apparently some tribes in India extract earthworm mucus and give it to their kids to prevent asthma. Much research remains for the health benefits of earthworms.

Earthworms belong to the Lumbricidae family, of which at least two genus are mentioned in literature: Eisenia, named after an American scientist and sometimes called rosy worms, and Lumbricus, of unclear etymology.

In Britain, if you want to get all native foody, the lob worm (Lumbricus terrestris) is the largest and the only deep burrowing worm.

There are companies that are already producing earthworm flour for incorporation (hiding) in regular baked goods like breads and cakes, but some areas don’t shy away from the worm’s true form and will cook earthworms with pieces of bamboo, or straight up serve grilled earthworms on sticks.

I’ve thrown up mixed results for what earthworms actually taste like. Some say it tastes quite earthy, but I would volunteer that they taste a lot like the last thing they eat given they’re basically meat-socks. So maybe let them have a drink of milk or apple puree before processing would work well.

Final Thoughts

So, do you have the stomach for it? Or perhaps you will opt to sneak an earthworm into your diet in flour form, or go the more culturally acceptable route of insect powder.

Start firing up that vermicomposter.

Until next time.

Further Reading

• Earthworms: A Source of Protein

• Earthworms as an alternative protein source for human consumption: Nutritional value, sustainability, processing, and safety considerations—A systematic review

• Eisenia foetida flour, straight to your home

The second type of plant breeding advancement is really where people like myself shine, who are not traditionally educated but have their hands dipped into many pots.

I wrote an essay about my aspirations with Silverweed (Potentilla anserina, syn. Argentina anserina) two and a half years ago. I outlined my plans for increasing the edibility of Silverweed which included concepts like hybridisation and land race breeding to increase the root size.

This second type of advancement is nothing like that.

Let me explain.

I was listening to my good friend’s podcast () and was particularly inspired by the story of Sebastian Coccioba, an amateur plant breeder who has created his own home-lab for plant experiments.

Along with inspiration from and and dialog with an LLM, I came up with a mad cap DIY kitchen solution for increasing Silverweed root size. (And no, the LLM did not write this article.)

And I do mean that, I’m not using any tools and chemicals that you can’t buy from your local supermarket or garden centre (or online retailer).

Let’s reiterate the plan that kicked off this Substack.

I want to increase the size of Silverweed roots so they’re more worthwhile to harvest. Apart from root size, they are almost the ideal staple crop: self propagating (like strawberries), nutritious (more so than potatoes), great ground cover, maintenance free, shade tolerant, and on and on.

However: the roots are thin straggly things, less than a pencil thick in most cases and hard to scrub clean for cooking. They often snap off when you try and harvest them unless grown in a container.

The hybridisation experiments I’ve been documenting have lead me to conclude that they’re very weak seed bearers. They prefer to spread their stolons out and will only reluctantly flower if perfect conditions are met, or if they feel like they’re about to die.

Subscribe now

So, what can we do? I only cosplay patience (sometimes); if I don’t have to sit around for years breeding tiny little flowers then I won’t.

It turns out that inducing polyploidy in a plant tends to exaggerate various plant traits (flower colour, plant size, vigour and more) - it’s heavily used in the ornamental plant industry. Polyploidy is where the cells of an organism have more than two paired sets of chromosomes. It’s less common in animals than plants, and an alleged 30% of crops we eat are polyploids.

If we induce polyploidy in Silverweed, we will probably see thicker/stouter roots (in exchange for decreased length). In one blow, we can make them easier to harvest and easier to clean.

Typically, polyploidy is induced in a plant with a mutagenic chemical. The usual culprit is Colchicine which has some pretty toxic properties and very narrow “therapeutic index” (as in, get the dose wrong and you’re in trouble).

Surveying the literature, I discovered some food safe alternatives.

Candidates include Monosodium glutamate (yes, the white powder associated with western fast food) and caffeine.

It was at this point my excitement became too much to bear and theory met reality. I went into my half-light winter garden and ferreted out some Silverweed crowns, which I washed clean and placed in some sterile store-bought compost. I placed a heat mat on a filing cabinet, the pots upon that and some LED growing lights above the whole thing. A few days later, the Silverweed broke dormancy and two weeks after that tried to grow a flower(!) which I pinched off. A week after that a stolon was being sent out to colonise the rest of my office.

I opted for caffeine, but then I had to figure out how to apply it to maximise my chances of chromosome doubling.

It turns out that we can turn the vegetative propagation tendencies of Silverweed against itself. The stolons it sends out are segmented, with each node first sending up a small leaf bud, then a small swelling on the opposite side becomes the roots. These runners are why Silverweed is seen by many ornamental gardeners as a pest.

I mixed a crushed caffeine tablet between two spoons (200mg) with 10g of lanolin (caffeine first dissolved in a few drops of rubbing alcohol), and then applied it to one of these nodes. Importantly, I poked a needle into the very centre of the leaf bud so that the waxy mixture could soak into the undifferentiated (stem) cells that would become leaf cells. The root nubs are already ideal for absorbing the mixture.

I wrapped the nodes in aluminium foil for 48 hours, uncovered them and tried to wash the greasy lanolin mixture off without much success, and placed the nodes in another pot of soil so they would root. I could tell that the caffeine had an effect because some nodes were brown and burnt looking. Some nodes survived though.

Now I’m sat here, waiting for some tender green shoots to emerge from the satellite pot, wondering whether the caffeine mixture was too toxic for the nodes. The caffeine mix was applied to the leaf and root sides of the nodes, but if doubling only happened on one side I wouldn’t be able to tell unless I expose the root.

I’ll be watching out for significantly different leaf morphology from the nodes, perhaps darker green leaves, or significantly different texture or weight.

My back up plan is to buy some caffeine gel packs that endurance athletes eat. They’re the perfect concentration already and easily washed off (unlike lanolin!).

Final Thoughts

Before we go, let’s recap the ingredients list and add them to your weekly shop:

• Heat mat (optional)

• Grow lights

• Caffeine tablets (200mg)

• Lanolin or petroleum jelly

• Rubbing alcohol

• Aluminium foil

• Sewing needle

• Compost

• Plant fertiliser (the compost will run out of nutrient)

If this works, it’s more proof that your every day person can start a crude yet effective homelab to alter plant genetics.

It's worth thinking about other plants that root with stolons, because the same trick can be applied to those. Perhaps you want a more vigorous ground elder? Now's your chance!

There's variations on a theme to this type of mutagenesis, from changing up the mutagen (for example, hydrogen peroxide or UV light) to targeting a different part of that plant (like the seed or the pollen).

I might explore these options too, but different mutagens affect the genes in different ways and MSG/caffeine affect the genes in a way that is more likely to induce chromosome doubling than hydrogen peroxide (oxidation based mutation).

Until next time.

Subscribe now

Further Reading

• The Effect of Polyploidisation on the Physiological Parameters, Biochemical Profile, and Tolerance to Abiotic and Biotic Stresses of Plants

• Studies on Colchicine Induced Chromosome Doubling for Enhancement of Quality Traits in Ornamental Plants

• Effectiveness and efficiency of Monosodium Glutamate as a potential mutagen inducing polyploidy in Drimia indica (Roxb.) Jessop

• The Effect of Caffeine and Trifluralin on Chromosome Doubling in Wheat Anther Culture

• Effects of Polyploidization on Morphology, Photosynthetic Parameters and Sucrose Metabolism in Lily

• Comparative Analysis of Morphology, Photosynthetic Physiology, and Transcriptome Between Diploid and Tetraploid Barley Derived From Microspore Culture

• Wikipedia’s entry of Colchicine

Typical response to this generally include tomato breeding, but I’m talking perennial plants like trees and bushes.

It’s an issue of genetics. If you have two species you’d like to cross, you need to gather a large number of both types (especially if you factor in partial incompatibility). The traditional theory goes that the further the genetic distance between two species, the more breeding “attempts” before success.

There appear to be some techniques to get past this genetic barrier, and to read more about that, I refer you to the excellent (what a great name) Substack written by a friend where they discuss and more importantly practice mentor grafting and other brilliantly fantastic methods to chummy up two species

Back to the point, if your plot of land is small, you probably won’t be able to gather enough of your two target species to make a sufficiently large child pool (the so-called F1 generation). If you don’t have enough F1 genetic diversity, then your later generations will start to suffer from genetic bottling, that is, there won’t be enough genetic depth for a vigorous and expansive population. I read a lot of Science Fiction and sometimes the topic of the minimum viable population size pops up (in the context of space colonies, usually). Consensus varies for how many humans you need to have a thriving population, but could be as low as 8 females and 7 males.

One day, I was walking past a fruiting ornamental hedge and two thoughts struck me: “This an Elaeagnus × ebbingei hedge, you’ve been looking for a decent fruiting example for ages!”, followed shortly by the favourite Apple grower’s adage “Ah, but it won’t grow true from seed”.

Elaeagnus × ebbingei is a cross between Elaeagnus macrophylla and Elaeagnus pungens and is one of the very scant few evergreen (in mild frost), fruiting cold tolerant hedges out there.

I harvested the fruit anyway and planted the seed after shucking off the sweet-astringent pulp. A few months later, seedlings started germinating and I decided to up-pot these.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that I could take advantage of this hybridisation. Some tree nursery has already gone to the trouble of breeding and propagating the most vigorous F1 hybrid. Let’s use these genetics and see what crazy traits we can get in later generations.

We basically get to skip the initial (possibly boring) species breeding step and go straight to the fun plant trait lottery. There’s some trusting that the initial cross has enough depth, but I think the beauty of this idea is that the hybrid cultivars have already been tried in the fire of the cutthroat ornamental tree industry. If a cultivar wasn’t ridiculously hard wearing and tolerant of neglect, it would be weeded out by market forces.

So what down sides do we have? I can only think of two, and it’s really just one if you can expand your mind.

Firstly, you can’t be picky. If no existing hybrid cultivar exists on the market then that’s it unless you have some friends in high places.

This isn’t so bad though. All plants are fascinating anyway. My gripe is mainly that of these commercially available hybrids, only a subset would be edible.

The second is this: not all hybrids you can buy produce fertile seeds. In fact, some are specifically prized because of their infertility so they don’t become a nuisance, but given enough tries, even mules can sometimes bear offspring.

So where do we find a list of hybrids to start raiding? Where there is a market, there is a catalogue. In the UK, we have the venerable Royal Horticulture Society’s Award of Garden Merit. Read about it if you want, but I can summarise it as “plants that look good but are hard to kill”.

This substack is not my full time job, so I pointed a LLM at their 100+ PDF catalogue to extract the hybrids and group them into interesting themes.

Some enticing examples include:

• × Cuprocyparis leylandii, Leylandii

• × Mahoberberis aquisargentii, Hybrid mahonia

• Erica × darleyensis, Darley Dale heath

Leylandii is wildly popular in the UK because it grows like mad, and might be the cheapest way to make a hedge. There’s what I will call a fan site devoted to this conifer. It’s a hybrid between Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) and Nootka cypress (Cupressus nootkatensis) and is generally infertile, though there is speculation that if you back cross it with the original parent you can get some F1b seedlings.

Hybrid mahonia is again very popular in British gardens. It’s a cross between Mahonia and Berberis (which are so taxonomically similar that they might end up in the same genus one day). The Mahonia species also belongs to that special group of cold tolerant evergreen trees that bear edible fruit.

Darley Dale heath is a cross between E. carnea and E. erigena. It’s special amongst the heathers because it can tolerate all soil types. There’s a decent chance that the heather you pick up from a garden centre is a Darley Dale heath. You can plant this one in a tricky barren spot of your food forest to benefit pollinators and for medicine.

There’s plenty to be excited about. If you broke past the infertility barrier of Leylandii with back crossing then you could get start a whole new species of incredibly fast growing edible conifers. Hybrid mahonias don’t need much work, they’re incredibly tough anyway but you could probably look for sweeter or plumper progeny (or the moon-shot of removing the spiky leaves). Both Darley Dale heath and Hybrid mahonias have plenty of cultivars out there which means it’s an easy cross, but it’s always fun to explore plant traits.

So as usual, walk around your neighbourhood and browse your country’s plant catalogues and see what interesting hybrids lurk in plain sight. If you like, have a look at the series I wrote on how to cheaply and rapidly stock a food forest.

Happy New Year, and happy plant breeding.

Until next time.

I’ve never seen lightning strike, but I imagine it to be a stunning event, lighting the forest with incandescent rage, splitting a tree asunder and leaving a hungry fire.

I’ve never seen lightning strike, but I have played a piece of piano music to the best of my ability. The moments where I forget my fingers and feel the music (the strike), the burning afterglow of a job well done, that connection to the melody (the smouldering forest fire).

I’ve never seen lightning strike, but I have planted a seed. I have nurtured the sapling and witnessed it finally quicken, finally settle into harmony with its surroundings and leap into the sky. I like to imagine that that justified rightness, that “I made the right choice” feeling is just like a lightning strike, and the fire is what kindles that dream of thousand future plantings.

Perhaps I have seen lightning strike after all. The sudden bolt of conviction and belief that imparts a continued smouldering passion; perhaps that is the line that separates a hobby from a life’s work.

Perhaps that feeling is universal, girdling all passions: permaculturalists to luxury handbag collectors, hectare food foresters to city dwellers, plant breeders to video gamers, fermentation fans to all-you-can-eat food challengers.

Perhaps we’ve all just caught lightning in different ways but have the same type of burning passion underneath.

If only we can just transfer the subject of passions: imagine the geniuses behind supercars lining up to build super engines of carbon sequestration.

Subscribe now

There’s a fine line between contentment and envy. The first is a freeing and open feeling. The second is a clenched white knuckle tension.

Make a map of my food forest journey and you’ll see my feelings slalom repeatedly across this line.

At the beginning, when a plague trapped us all at home, my canvas was a twenty square metre box. My brush was my hands, spade and sweat and my paint, the plants. I laboured in love to create a harmonious image. I was content with my lot.

As my canvas filled, I lost heart. I began to read books like “Restoration Agriculture” by Mark Shepard. My dreams became filled with oak and sweet chestnut and apple orchards, underplanted with fruit bushes and freely foraged by pigs and chickens on the forest floor. My dreams became a puce coloured desire as I looked at people with large expanses of grass. I even became jealous of those who lived in countries with lots of land. “Just give me an acre! What I could do with that much land!” I would exclaim, every time I saw a green lawn desert.

Envy robbed me of joy. It replaced the pleasure of the present with a sucking hollow of what could be.

Food forest envy can take many forms and I’ve probably foundered my ship on most of them.

That person has a more productive polyculture, that one a more bountiful harvest of figs, that one a more more supportive community, and perhaps - for me - the most soul destroying, that person has so much sunlight. “What I could do with all that sunlight!”

(You have probably inferred, reader, that I live in a particularly overcast part of the U.K. My doctor recommends permanent vitamin D supplements - it’s just that cloudy.)

What I am learning, repeatedly, is that admiration can lead to envy which then destroys my contentment more reliably than tomato blight will ruin your late crop. Instead of taking advantage of the space I have with joy, if I’m not careful, I end up looking at my creation with scorn.

Would I like to breed a watermelon or bitter melon adapted to outside conditions in the UK? Of course! - who wouldn’t! - but my life circumstances just don’t align with that desire, and that is OK.

Would I like to dig a lake and stock it with cattail and stickleback and swim there everyday? Of course! - who wouldn’t! - but perhaps I will never have that chance, and that is OK too. Humans are overly fond of owning stuff anyway.

For now, I’ll try and practice my content every day whilst I stare at my mini pond and shark melon patch.

Subscribe now

Further Reading

• Anger Addiction is a real public epidemic and permaculturalists suffer from it too

• Mark Shepard is the author of Restoration Agriculture, but also has many other occupations.

Humans are not plants.

That seems obvious. Imagine if we did treat humans like plants, imagine if we took a diverse sample of people from all over the world and dumped them into one single spot. And we said: “sort yourselves out. If you some of you are less than successful with your neighbours, you’ll fade away, too bad!”

Plants are not humans.

This also seems obvious. Imagine if we agonised and grieved the death of every seedling, celebrated the birthday of every plant, left a tree half of our inheritance.

Humans are similar to plants.

Throughout history, colonial powers have divided and parcelled distinct and diverse human groupings into confined regions. Humans have taken rulers to maps and split apart tribes. These groupings have actually been told to get on with it, and we have benefited from the ignominious fruits of these pressure pot experiments.

Plants are similar to humans.

Scores of charities have been set up to conserve plants. When a famous sycamore tree was felled in the UK, outrage was the national response, and imprisonment was the vandal’s punishment. Some near extinct plants have been carefully husbanded, tears and blood being shed to ensure their survival.

We generally don’t treat plants like humans.

Sometimes, though, I try and pretend that I’m that tomato plant I planted in my back garden. I’ll look up and wonder what on earth that apple tree is doing above me. I’ll wonder why my cousin - the bittersweet nightshade - is fighting it out with a sharkfin melon on the boughs of that apple tree. I myself will be frantically fighting off that apple mint by sinking my roots deep down and getting stressed out by the constant dampness and semi-shade. I’d say hello to the grumpy wild cabbage growing next door. Their root exodates are telling me they are as perplexed as I am - where is their sea cliff? Deep in my roots, I know I belong to a tropical climate.

And my perspective will shift. I’d be a human again, sitting before a might oaken judge and being accused of acts of genocide against plantkind. Didn’t the comfrey see you tear up giant hunks of applemint last week? Didn’t you hear the collective screams? Did you not ruthlessly slice down the comfrey witness last month and fertilise their enemies with their body parts? They’ve only just regrown! I’d bow my head in assent.

In many way, I’m glad plants are not like humans.

There are , however, good things to be had if you cultivate your empathy with plants. Western culture might not understand, but saying thanks to that potato plant for tirelessly growing tubers for you, or greeting that apple tree in the park like an old friend renews your perspective. Lay a hand on that fissured bark and try and imagine the sap rising through the cambium like the blood of a mighty animal, close your eyes and imagine the wind in the leaves like the sighing of a patient witness.

I think acts like these encourage a deeper respect for nature.

A plant isn’t a human, but try thinking like one the next time you stare at your polyculture.

“- budget ..-cut. -toast.”

The words bounced off me, didn’t register. I was jacked into my augmented reality desktop, coloured graphs and numbers dancing at my command.

“Damnit, hey - listen up!”

A hand shoved my shoulder. I irritably slashed my hand and the AR display cowed themselves immediately.

I stayed looking straight ahead, taking in the grubby sunless office with its forlornly discarded coffee cups.

“We’ve been given marching orders, it’s off to the Jovian Orbital Farms, Europa. They’ve got some fancy new geneng, magnetosynthesis or something, photons are yesterday’s news. Highest magnetic flux out there.”

“Are you listening?”

A pause, a snort, then footsteps thumped off and a door swished shut.

I breathed evenly and resummoned the AR display.

“Persephone, did the last search turn up anything?”

"I'm sorry Demeter, I timed out, there were too many results. You will need to narrow the search criteria."

“Fine, instead of all edible fruit, narrow it down to stuff in the.. Rubus family, and narrow the time window down to the first decade of the 2100s, United Kingdom.”

"Stand by.."

An all too familiar processing wheel appeared in the centre of my vision and I waved it away. I fumbled around for the least cold coffee cup.

Magnetosynthesis? I mused on that, unsure at this point if they still counted as plants but if you could eat it, then why not. We’ve been powered by photons for so long now, why not magnetic flux. As for me, I had to finish this project soon. The searchable phase space was rapidly degrading as time marched inexorably forward. If I didn’t hurry up and mine the pre-Holocene extinction, we’d run out of crazy stuff to gene edit. Not that the higher ups cared about genetic bottling, I was very doubtful of the latest results to artificially boost the genetic diversity of the few crops we’d manage to save. The flooding of the seed banks on Earth was a major blow - too many eggs in one basket.

I wished that I had managed to worm my way onto this project five years earlier, the search times were getting longer and longer as the Holocene drifted down the timeline.

"I have filtered the results for all the Rubus in the land mass formerly known as the United Kingdom that have fruit set up to two sigmas above the mean."

“Wait, before you blind me with graphs, can you eliminate all specimens with DNA that we already have on record.”

A graphic flashed into view. The Y-axis was a long alphabetised list of Rubus species, the X-axis was the size of the fruit as a percentage of the average fruit size across all Rubus. I clicked the sort button to arrange the Y-axis by fruit size instead. I could see by the colours that most of the species had average fruit size (green), a large tail of lower than average fruit size (yellow fading to red) and a small tail of higher than average fruit (blue fading to purple). I clicked another button and filtered out species we were already experimenting with in our labs and the Y-axis shrank by a third with the blue-purple above-average fruit size taking the highest casualties.

I sighed and zoomed in on the top ten but none were above one sigma.

Abnormally large edible fruit was a no go unless I wanted to go through every species one at a time, but with just the Rubus family I knew it was just a patience game. The area formerly known as the United Kingdom was mostly under ice now. My research showed that it had one of the most evenly distributed observer density to nature ratios. Healthier biomes existed back then, of course, but I couldn’t mine those because they were too sparsely populated. The United Kingdom had the sweet spot, random folk ambling around, never too far from a plant.

My train of thought looped back onto my derision of magnetosynthesis.

“Seph, is there anything stopping us from creating our own species classification system?”

"In theory no, but you will need to define the bounds for me to generate quantitative analysis."

I kicked off a wall and my chair leapt across the floor, swirling around, my excitement building. I felt my arm knock over a cup of coffee.

“You will need to fill in the gaps for my laymen’s understanding. Take a survey of all the genetic material associated with the genus Rubus in the first decade of the 2100s, United Kingdom. Create some kind of idealised Rubus genetic profile map that is the typical or average in all the Rubus traits. Use that as the base line for what we call Rubus. This is step one, do that for now.”

“Demeter, I need some clarification on what average means in terms of genetic sequences.”

“Be creative. Use pattern analysis to create a metric of genetic sequence similarities.”

“This will take some time, processing…”

A notification window popped up, with the heading “System deactivation at 18:00 tonight”. I still had a few hours, no time to lose. I ripped open a nutrient bar and bit down.

“Complete.”

As I might have guessed, an idealised Rubus plant appeared before me. Something a child savant might draw but not quite matching any existing Rubus. Dark red stems, covered in thorns, symmetrical deep green leaves, plump black bunches of fruit hanging like miniature grapes. Unintelligible genetic information flashed around it.

“Now take that idealised Rubus genetic sequence and look for plants that deviate by up to two sigma of genetic sequence. Take the plants that fit into that category and create the same type of graphic as before, Y-axis being the list of plants, X-axis colour indicating fruit size.”

“This will take some time, processing.”

I tried to relax my jaw and started gesturing wildly. I kicked off some last ditch back-up processes hidden in some hidden crevices of our server infrastructure that with any luck would be missed by the clean-up crew. They would forward as much information as possible to my own turn-key, low-powered and highly illegal Persephone.

“Complete.”

A similar graphic as before popped up as before, but there was now, by my human eyes, twice as much blue and purple. Finally, so much large fruit!

“Seph, what is going on here?”

“With your new species classification system, a lot more plants became candidates. These plants have what we called hybridisation events within the last few generations. A lot of these plants are very unlikely because the natural hybridisation between their parents was unlikely through typical pollinators.”

I pinched my fingers to zoom in on the blue-purple patch at the top of the Y-axis.

“Is there anything particularly unusual about the largest fruit sizes here?”

My pulse beat quicker.

“Yes, the plants here with the largest fruits also have the highest percentage of ‘non-Rubus’ genetic material.”

“Are you saying that the more hybridised a Rubus plant is, the higher fruit set it has?”

“Not quite, if you look at the graph of percentage non-Rubus material against fruit size, you’ll see that largest variation is amongst the plants with the largest genetic variation.”

The graph popped up and sure enough, apart from a small plateau of quite regular average sized fruit, the variation of fruit size was basically random, zig-zagging all over the place.

Except..

“Seph, what is that tight cluster of fruit sizes at about half sigma. Why is there more data there than anywhere else?”

“That seems to be isolated to one particular subregion in the UK. Would you like more information?”

More graphs started popping up, breaking down the composition of the hybridisation in that subregion. When visuals of oak trees started flashing by, I paused the stream.

“Seph, are you trying to tell me that some one or some group of people were actively crossing Rubus with trees?”

“It appears to be the case. Other notable families include the roses, apple trees.”

“What’s the craziest cross we’re talking about here, Seph?”

“If you mean phylogenetic distance, there’s one instance of a rubus potato cross.”

As other unlikely parents started scrolling down, I tore off my headset and started pacing around the dark office.

“Seph, can you still hear me?”

Her cool voice pipped in my ear.

“Yes, of course.”

I took a deep breath.

“Take backups of the genetic data from that subregion in the United Kingdom in that time period. Send them to the Jovian Orbital farms on Europa. Broadcast them to the rest of the free web too.”

“As you wish, Demeter”    

Ever since I fell down the plant breeding rabbit hole, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Solanaceae. Whilst I admire the dedication tomato breeders bring to the craft, I think it can act like a giant tomato shaped black hole, sucking all breeding into its gravitational pull.

Having said that, last year a peculiar vining plant showed up next to my apple tree. I let it grow on and was surprised by beautiful sprays of purple flowers. There was something familiar about this flower, and I quickly walked over to a flowering volunteer potato plant in my compost heap. The connection was becoming clearer.

I pulled out iNaturalist and quickly learned that this was Bittersweet Nightshade, Solanum dulcamara.

As you might know, potatoes (Solanum tuberosum), tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), aubergine (Solanum melongena) and peppers (Capsicum sp.) all belong to the Nightshade (Solanaceae) family. They have the dubious honour of being on the right side of humanity, as in, they won’t kill you if you eat them (in the right way!).

Unfortunately, in cold temperate regions of the world (like the British Isles that yours truly inhabits), none of them can overwinter.

Thus we can return to Bittersweet Nightshade. This thing happily survived through our winter and has just started throwing out those beautiful purple flowers again. Some people claim that Solanum dulcamara has edible berries when fully ripe but I have not dared so far.

Last week, I decided to field graft a tomato to a bittersweet vine. I walked away and forgot about it until this morning. I think the graft might have taken but I will think very carefully if any fruit are borne!

Staring at this moonshot graft, I decided to draw up a list of members of the Solanaceae family that are cold temperate perennials in this soggy climate for fun and science. I’m focusing on species that easily sourced in the UK, so you might have a chance to create your very own Nightshade Garden (no, not Night Garden). I’ll group them by plant form as I think this highlights their variety.

Tree-form Nightshades

Lycium barbarum & L. chinense

Yes, the Goji trees are in the nightshade family. The Chinese have published research on grafting tomatoes to Goji rootstock to take advantage of their salt tolerance. Goji berries have become a “superfood” recently, but the leaves are a decent addition to your salads and stews. I have a 5 year old Goji tree that started off as a branch from a Oriental Supermarket, they root very easily.

Vining-form Nightshades

Solanum dulcamara

Bittersweet Nightshade can apparently volunteer randomly in your garden. If you pay attention, they are an uncommon hedgerow denizen too. Personally, I love how it climbs up nearby plants and forms a robust woody stem unlike its faint-hearted tomato cousin. The berries go from green, to yellow-orange, to red when ripened

Solanum crispum

The Potato tree is a new one to me, but the RHS love it so much a specific cultivar was awarded the “Garden Merit”. They apparently grow like Bittersweet Nightshade but the light purple flowers give way to white berries instead of red.

Bush-type Nightshades

Alkekengi officinarum

An extremely hardy cousin to the physalis (Physalis peruviana) that can sometimes be purchased in the exotic section of British supermarkets. Like the physalis, the fruit are borne in cage-like husks of petals. Tolerating temperatures down to -20°C, it was kept several hundred years ago in medicinal gardens where they are still found living feral. They are the Nightshade’s answer to mint.

Atropa bella-donna

Deadly Nightshade doesn’t need an introduction. One of the party stories I tell is apocryphal (only because I can’t find the source anymore); about a farmer who grafted tomato onto Atropa bella-donnna and made a meal with the super vigorous tomatoes that ultimately killed his family. I wasn’t aware that it was perennial in the UK.

Mandragora autumnalis

Mandrakes in general have a fascinating mythology, the most widely recalled one being their death-inducing scream when pulled from the ground. Mandrakes in general have huge genetic variety. Some people classify the autumn Mandrake as separate to Mandragora officinarum. In either case, sufficient quantities of the root extract were once used to knock people out for surgery!

Final Thoughts

If you can think of any more tree-form Nightshades, please let me know. I’m pretty sure that Lycium barbarum and L. chinense are the only two that thrive outdoors in the UK.

There are a few more vining Nightshades and definitely more bushy Nightshades, but the ones I’ve listed are the most easily purchased (either as seed or plant).

All these Solanaceae survive British winters easily. Unfortunately, only the Goji tree is also good to eat.

Until next time.

Further Reading

• “Hexing Herbs” in Ethnobotanical Perspective: A Historical Review of the Uses of Anticholinergic Solanaceae Plants in Europe (paywall)

• Comparative Profiling of miRNAs and Target Gene Identification in Distant-Grafting between Tomato and Lycium (Goji Berry)

• “Mason had grafted a tomato plant to a Jimson-weed plant.”

  • Jimson-weed being Datura stramonium: “An individual seed contains about 0.1 mg of atropine, and the approximate fatal dose for adult humans is >10 mg atropine”

• Some of my notes on “field grafting”

It’s a work of fiction, exploring how a person very similar to myself would adapt his local plants in a world where international communication has somehow broken down.

I call it “Hyperlocal Edimental Sufficiency”. “Hyperlocal” because everything is sourced as locally as possible, “edimental” because the character tries to maximise the use of edible ornamentals (so I borrow the term from the pioneering Stephen Barstow, check out his book), and “sufficiency” because of the potential of this method for sustaining us, body and mind.

He’s sat at his garden bench again, looking over his (semi) self-sufficient garden.

The first thing that catches his eye is the Japanese Camellia (Camellia japonica). This bush has been here for more than 20 years, before he moved into the property. For the last few years he’s been harvesting the young greener leaves as a Chinese Camellia (Black tea, C. chinensis) substitute. His quest for a decent black tea substitute has taken many twists and turns, though nowadays he’s also honed a decent brew from the rugged Ceanothus hybrid, Dasiphora fruticosa shrub and the common holly (Ilex aquifolium).

Those were the days, when he could easily ship in plants from a few cities across. He even remembers when you could ship internationally on a larger budget - times long gone now.

In present times, he has to make do with the fossil fuel heritage of yesteryear. His gaze is drawn to an interesting elderberry hybrid shrub he created a few years ago. His neighbour has one of those ornamental dark red elderberry trees - a quick exchange of his locally famous chocolate apple-mint cuttings gives him unlimited access to the tree. He was particularly interested in the health properties of the red pigmentation and decided to cross the red elderberry with his white flowered one. He’s still waiting for the child to flower, but the precocious red tinged leaves look promising.

He’s been exchanging tips with some people a few streets over when he spotted them pulling up some Red Campion (Silene dioica) from their vegetable bed. They were initially sceptical about cooking the young leaves but were willing to try especially as Red Campion requires no work. In these times, who doesn’t want free food? He’ll have to pop over soon with his hyperlocal ferment soon - maybe he’ll tell them about the forget-me-not leaves (Myosotis sylvatica) he’s sneaked into the mixture too. He makes a mental note to take a long walk to the river to pick up some White Campion (Silene latifolia). He dimly remembers reading that it hybridises readily with Red Campion.

He gets up and wanders up to his chocolate apple-mint patch. He pinches a leaf and breathes deeply, thinking back to when his apple-mint and chocolate mint plants spontaneously crossed. The dark brown furry leaves are a perfect middle ground between the parents and an absolute hit since chocolate has been impossible to find even on the black market. He has had some pretty good success with adding his chocolate apple-mint with the mock-orange (Philadelphus) tree flowers - the biggest problem with that being timing the infusion to when the Philadelphus flowers. If that works out, he’ll have some great bartering material - who doesn’t want an orange-apple-chocolate-mint homebrew? He’ll have to share a bottle with the person whose tree he took the initial cutting from.

Underneath his established elderberry tree, the Rayfin melons are taking off again. He’s lucky he managed to get that initial Cucurbita lundelliana x C. ficifolia hybrid seed from an American friend before souring transatlantic relationships put an end to that type of exchange. Since then, he’s been crossing and backcrossing with his landraced Sharkfin melon until he’s got a super-vigorous Cucurbita species he’s decided to called Rayfin. The fruits are smaller and ripen faster. Last week, he exchanged a few of the Rayfin seeds to a confused missiveman for an eighty character translatlantic message, maybe it’s finally propagated its way over. He wants to restart his mentor grafting projects again - he’s never quite given up on turning watermelon into a reliable cold temperate crop.

His rumbling stomach tells him its lunch time soon. He walks over to his dandelion patch and starts plucking some fat leaves. This is his latest obsession, he’s been grabbing dandelion seed heads from all over. He’s roped the barterman into his plan too - she’s been asking at every village for a handful of seed. He’s looking for the dandelions that give the largest leaves for nutritious greens, the thickest and longest stems for the most substantial “dandelion noodles” and the largest flowers because beauty still matters.

How many jars of ferment would it cost to bribe the barterman to smuggle some of the red, white and pink species from the military botanical compound…

Understanding the natural world is a seemingly ceaseless unfolding of knowledge. Every time I think I’ve “understood” a plant to a sufficient degree I find a new seam which unfurls into a new, deeper appreciation.

Today, we’ll talk about Silene dioica, or Red Campion in English vernacular (the flowers are clearly pink or purple!)

Silene dioica is one of the first plants to re-merge in my garden after the grim half-light of British winter. I’ve come to depend on the green rosette of peach-fuzz leaves as a totem of lighter, warmer days.

Towards later Spring, Red Campion launches skywards on thin but rigid stems. These stems bear urn-shaped pink flowers that flare out dramatically for pollinators.

A Red Campion plant is male or female (dioecious, like its Latin namesake). They depend on insect pollination which doesn’t seem a problem in my garden. The female flowers set seed and dry out. Later in the summer, there’s a very distinctive sounding period where the seeds cascade onto the soil at the slightest disturbance.

So this is how I’ve come to know Red Campion; not as a botanist but as an old familiar friend, by sight and touch and sound.

As it turns out, this old friend is also edible.

I’ve been trying to discover whether Silene dioica is edible for at least a year. As readers might now, eventually a plant will wilt beneath my hungry maw and when I recently came across a copy of Stephen Facciola’s exhaustive Cornucopia II, I had a feeling my old friend would succumb:

Silene dioica - Red campion. Young leaves are added to pistic, like those of S. alba and S. vulgaris. They are boiled for several minutes, drained, then sauteed with butter, garlic and small pieces of lard. Pistic is eaten as an ancient rite of spring in parts of northern Italy, Europe - PAOLETTI

“PAOLETTI” refers to a paper entitled “Pistic, Traditional Food from Western Friuli, N.E. Italy, 1995”.

Silene vulgaris is the rock star of the Campion family. Also known as maidenstears or bladder campion, many Mediterranean countries consume it.

In Cyprus it is agriopapoula and fried gently in olive oil. In Italy it is sculpit or stridolo (amongst other names) and used in risottos. There is widespread use of S. vulgaris in Spain as a leafy vegetable.

My own independent research has unearthed a possible tradition of eating Red Campion as a vegetable in Campoo, Northern Spain. The authors did not record any preparation details and as far as I can tell this is the sole mention.

So, I have at least two references - one more solid than the other - and a vast surplus of beckoning Red Campion rosettes in my garden. Using the “PAOLETTI” paper as a guide…

This is the preparation of a special dish, known as “pistic,” a collection of 56 wild herbaceous meadow and wood plants which are boiled and then sautéed together.

…we can get cooking.

British Suburban Garden “Pistic”

1. Pick your collection of edible herbaceous and woody plants.

   1. In the photos, I used mostly Red Campion (Silene dioica), a bit of dock leaf (Rumex obtusifolius) and dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), but I’ve also repeated this with some nettle (Urtica dioica), perennial kale (Brassica oleracea), yellow archangel (Lamium galeobdolon) and other opportunistic back garden vegetables.

   2. Optional: cut away the central rib of each Red Campion leaf and don’t use any stems for a smoother eating experience

2. Wash the leaves if you want, then blanch them for two minutes in boiling water

3. Drain the water and fry gently with butter or oil (add salt)

   1. I like to add an egg and some kind of legume at this point

4. Plate up, drizzle olive oil and a bit of pepper on top and enjoy

So I’ve put some pretty photos up, but what does sautéing blanched Silene dioica leaves taste like? Some observations:

• Raw Red Campion leaves are no good as a fresh salad. If they weren’t hairy, they would resemble dandelion leaves in taste but they lack the crisp mouth-feel.

• After blanching, Red Campion leaves taste and feel like boiled, very slightly bitter spinach.

• After sautéing, the butter binds to any remaining bitterness and the leaves melt delightfully in your mouth.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating, I was quite staggered at my first forkful (especially compared to the raw leaf).

I’m lucky enough that one of my oldest gardening companions turned out to have a beautiful hidden side.

What “weedy” plants in your garden are you overlooking?

Breeding Aside

Silene dioica probably doesn’t need much improvement in my garden, it well and truly has dominated the flowering space and has a hearty seed bed to fall back on in leaner times. However, plant breeding can just be for fun. I know that Silene dioica quite readily hybridises with the white flowered S. latifolia (syn. S. alba) to create a fertile hybrid. Of course, we can have a go at crossing with S. vulgaris to try and improve the experience of eating the raw leaves. Luckily for us, these two crosses will be easy as they are between single-gendered plants (in other words, just pluck off the male flower of one species and pollinate the female of the other species).

It would be the work of many life times to explore the 900+ Silene species. In my garden, S. coronaria holds a special place in my heart with its electric pink flowers. There’s more than 400,000 unique crosses that can be made between the species of this family. An unknown subset of these will be edible - what are you waiting for?

Final Thoughts

Sometimes, your closest garden plant companions are also very tasty.

I think that Silene dioica should play no second fiddle to Silene vulgaris. In my garden at least, my patch of carefully seed-grown Silene vulgaris fizzled away pathetically while its cousin romped away right nearby. In the few times there has been a drought here, Red Campion cheerfully shrugged it off. I well and truly have a “cultivar” adapted to my microclimate.

If you’re able to get access, its worth going through that list of 53 leaves that make up the traditional Italian pistic. I was shocked to see another three wild species in my garden appear there: Myosotis arvensis, Ranunculus ficaria and R. repens.

That’s right, you read that properly, the field forget-me-not, the lesser celandine and most surprising to me, creeping butter cup. I’ve not come across any common lore about anyone else consuming Myosotis arvensis, but those two Ranunculus are generally avoided. Though now I’m reading about the toxins, they seem to very heat unstable. Perhaps my stretch goal will be to add these three extra friends to my pistic…

at always jokes that I’ll try anything remotely edible and I suppose I’m steadily building a body of evidence for him.

Until next time.

In a previous post, I delved into the evidence of consuming English Holly (Ilex aquifolium) as a hot beverage.

Feel free to catch up on that, but this article can mostly stand by itself.

Sometimes I consider myself scientific (or at least science-adjacent), but in the case of making my first cup of I. aquifolium tea I was impatient.

Experiment 1: “Just roast it”

I plucked a branch of holly from a local foot path, washed the leaves and roasted them at 150°C (300°F) in my air fryer for several hours until they were very crispy and brown. I crushed the leaves into a semi-fine powder.

My observations are thus:

1. A strong fishy smell permeated the leaves all through the roasting process

2. One tea spoon of the holly leaf powder in half a cup of boiling water, steeped for minutes, made a fishy smelling brown liquid that when tasted gave a fishy taste that clung to my palette.

3. Half a tea spoon in half a cup of boiling water, with just a few seconds of steeping, had a similar effect.

4. After drinking a quarter of the liquid, I didn’t experience any digestive effects the day after, or several weeks after

5. In fact, I had to brush my teeth and tongue to remove this fishy taste.

Not a good start. A mysterious nasty lingering “fishy” smell and taste all around, but I’m nothing if not persistent (or just stubborn).

Experiment 2: “Quick cure and roast”

After my fishy failure of experiment 1, I talked to quite a few people on how other Ilex species are prepared into a beverage and the main take-home message is to cure the holly leaves first. When I say cure, that is quite a nebulous term and I’ve taken it to mean that we should air dry the leaves for some unspecified amount of time.

In this experiment, I used some more leaves from the same holly branch as experiment 1 and “cooked” them at 60°C (140°F) in my air fryer for 2 hours - this is what I’m calling a “quick cure” - a bit above normal air temperature. After the quick cure, I air fried the leaves as in experiment 1. Before I crushed the leaves to powder, I roughly chopped off the spiky bits.

Here are my observations:

1. The quick cure phase was interesting:

   1. A very aromatic floral scent was released in the first few minutes, which then dropped off

   2. A strong fishy smell was subsequently released which then slowly dropped off

2. The high temperature air fry didn’t throw any extra fishy scent into the air

3. The subsequent 5 minute soak with one teaspoon of leaf powder hot water yielded a light brown liquid that had a very tiny taste of fish. At these dilutions, it was more of an umami undertone

4. Adding milk to another batch made a very pleasant black tea (Camelia sinensis) lookalike.

Interesting stuff! Both with and without milk, the tea was very drinkable - in fact, I struggled not to quaff the whole thing. It’s important to me that I don’t hurt my animal test subject (me!).

Experiment 3 - “Long cure and long high roast”

My last experiment involves curing the leaves for 4 hours at 50°C (120°F), followed by 2 hours at 190°C. New observations are as follows:

1. There is, as William Forsyth puts it, “a very disagreeable smell” at this higher temperature

2. It’s important to remove the prickles before pounding the roasted leaves or you won’t get a uniform tea blend.

Gathering Thoughts

I’m sat here, next to a steaming mug of Ilex aquifolium tea (with milk). Of the three experiments, number 3 is best with milk, number 2 is best without milk (more aromatic) and number 1 should be avoided.

My conclusions are that the curing phase at the beginning is important to remove the fishy (maybe even rancid) smell and taste that would develop if the fresh leaves were just roasted.

What could be responsible for this smell and taste? At this point, I asked a large language model to chew on some research that listed the chemical constituents of Ilex aquifolium and it thinks that the fatty acids in the leaves are mostly evaporated away on the curing step. If this step is missed, it hypotheses(!) that an excess amount of oxidised fatty acid byproducts is “baked” into the structure of the leaf. It is these by products that in high amounts lead to a fishy smell.

And this all seems logically consistent. Apologies if you are opposed to large language models, but in this case - for someone who is just a keen amateur - it helps me peek under the covers. I do try and fact check my assistant though.

Just to reiterate, the LLM thinks that curing the leaves evaporates a large amount of any fatty acids. Without the curing step, during the high temperature roasting step, the fatty acid oxidised byproducts get baked into the structure of the leaf - hence, fishy smelling and tasting brew. With the curing step, most of the fatty acids are evaporated away and we just end up with an aromatic brew.

I’m trying to think of the right phrase to describe this Common Holly tea. Perhaps something like “aromatically scented with slight umami undertones”. I was once gifted some Chinese tea (C. sinensis) leaves (jasmine tea, or something similar) that had somehow been prepared with some kind of fragrant oil - you could see the slight layer of oil at the surface of the beverage - and Holly tea reminds me of this brew. Some Chinese people also pour some black Chinese tea into their rice bowls after finishing a meal - the combination of fragrant beverage with the oils of the meal also strongly remind me of Holly tea.

When milk is added, the beverage is smoother as expected; the aromatic and umami tones are blunted but still present.

Is Holly tea safe to drink? I don’t know. People have been addicted to C. sinensis beverages long before modern science. Perhaps it is toxic if consumed daily but just fine occasionally. I don’t have the skills or equipment to answer this question - all I have is myself as a human lab rat and the dubious hypotheses of a large language model. What I will say is that quite a few other Ilex species are consumed in vast quantities and the chemical analyses of these species are very similar (barring caffiene) to I. aquifolium.

As I sip at this steaming mug of holly tea, my thoughts turn to William Forsyth in the 1850s, preparing the same holly tea for children and adult. They turn to these mysterious German Black Forest inhabits who might also have drunk holly tea, and further back to those peoples who first tried to brew other Ilex species and found them delicious.

The feeling of rediscovery, of linking back to people long gone, has been very special.

Pour out some holly tea to our forebears.

Common Holly Tea recipe

Again, please do your own research, I’m not responsible for what you consume.

1. Gather some holly branches

2. Optional: trim off the prickly bits

3. Dehydrate the whole branches of holly at 50°C (120°F) for 4 hours

4. Roast the whole branches of holly at 190°C (375°F) for 2 hours

5. Remove the leaves from the branch and pound/grind with a pestle and mortar or similar until the leaves break down into a rough tea blend

6. Use a metal tea strainer, AeroPress-type device or something similar and brew your roasted holly leaves for 5 minutes, roughly 6 tea spoons per normal mug (250-350ml)

7. Enjoy with or without milk

Final Thoughts

At least one text indicates that fresh holly leaves can just be boiled like a kind of soup to make a tea-like brew. This seems like low hanging fruit if true.

If you try making your own holly tea, please let me know what you think! I’d love to find out other people’s experiences.

What do you think about the LLM’s hypothesis on the origin of the fishy smell? In some ways it doesn’t matter, I’ve found a method of removing it (curing) but it’s nice to know the origin story.

Here is an updated list of caffienated Ilex species (thanks to readers): I. vomitoria, I. cassine, I. paraguarienesis, I. tarapotina

I’ve read that Ilex glabra was consumed by the first peoples of Eastern North(?) America - it makes a minty and aromatic cooling beverage. Ilex opaca has also been made into a tea. When you open the can of worms, there are a surprising number of Ilex species beverages! I should probably make a post about all the Ilex drinks I’ve come across on my research.

Further Reading

• Biological Potential and Chemical Profile of European Varieties of Ilex

• GC-MS and PCA Analysis of Fatty Acid Profile in Various Ilex Species

  • “We have demonstrated, that Ilex sp. cultivars can be divided into four groups based on their fatty acids profile. Majority of the variation is caused by hexadecanoic, α-linolenic and linoleic acids”

  • “n-Hexadecanoic acid was identified to provide ‘rancid’ and ‘pungent’ odors, which was the most frequently detected acid compound in Fu-brick tea”

• “Dried and roasted inkberry leaves were first used by Native Americans to brew a black tea-like drink, hence the sometimes used common name of Appalachian tea for this shrub.”

• “If I drink Gallberry tea within 40 minutes I have to go pray to the porcelain god.”