Silverweed Breeding Progress Report #2

Kind internet friends

For convenience, here is an index of my Silverweed related content.

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A quick update on my ongoing Silverweed breeding experiment.

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I now have specimens from several places around the UK. Here are the plants in pots to control the runners. Yes, some have tried to root into other specimen pots and even into their own.

Things may be getting a bit out of hand… (Those tall sunflower looking plants are Jerusalem Artichokes)

Isle of Skye, Inner Hebrides, Scotland, UK

Isle of Skye - these arrived on 1st June, a box containing 16(!) samples from different places around the isle. They are from a very generous lady who contacted me after seeing my first blog post. I’ll quote the late Gordon Hillman about this and you’ll then understand why I’m excited

The 19th-century Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1900) observed that Silverweed roots were counted as one of the ‘sevenbreads of the Gael’, which up to the arrival of the potato, were cultivated as well as gathered from the wild. He also reported that it was claimed in the Outer Hebrides island of North Uist that silverweed productivity was so great that a man could survive on the roots from a small plot. The abundance of silverweed in North Uist today gives credence to Carmichael’s claims (Ray Meares, Pers. Comm. 2011

It remains to be seen if the Silverweed of North Uist is significantly different or whether it is the environmental suitability of that region. I know that the Isle of Skye is not in the Outer Hebrides, but it is the northern most island of the Inner Hebrides, and the relative closeness makes me optimistic. I hope these plants survive - at least four have healthy looking leaves. They traveled a long way but they were well packaged with moist newspaper.

Skye Silverweed, second from the left has roots almost 1cm in width.

Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK

This was an eBay purchase in the autumn of 2021. These plants are very well established as they had a head start of not being prised out of their habitat - I let it create two plants from runners and I’ve been cutting off the rest. These were some of the first plants to show their green leaves after winter, hard as nails.

Well established silverweed from Oxfordshire

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Yorkshire/Canada/Skye

So, Alison Tindale generously sent me some silverweed from her allotment. She sourced hers from a few places but now they’re all mixed up. This is a wild card - it could even be some hybrid from the three countries - and will be great for the genetics of future breeding attempts. I can say that the leaves on these silverweed plants are significantly lusher and broader; less silvery and more green, with deeper leaf serrations. This specimen immediately put forth new green growth the day after I planted it.

Wildcard silverweed, either from Yorkshire, Canada, Isle of Skye or a mixture of all three!

Manchester, UK

My local area, this Mancunian silverweed was acquired from the side of a well trodden reservoir path about three weeks ago. I thought this plant would not survive as I didn’t get much of the storage roots and it had a brutal time of being freed from the ground, plus being washed back to the bare roots to remove any hitch hikers. Nevertheless, it came crashing back to life the day after with a new leaf. These silverweeds are amazing.

Mancunian silverweed

Freshly unearthed Mancunian silverweed, note the two thick edible tubers below like feet.

Spot the silverweed amongst the grass and creeping buttercup

Thoughts

• I’ve had one person who has offered to send seeds in the autumn from his potted silverweed, so I’m hopefully looking to add that to the collection.

• I may acquire another silverweed from eBay but they’re asking a lot for one plant - I might just do it for the sake of the silverweed genepool.

• I will keep an eye out through my summer travels for any more sources of silverweed.

• Next year, I think I will get my hands on some thinner, taller pots so that the tap root will be less restricted, but we shall see what these conventional plant pots will yield in terms of root size and shape.

• I saw mention online of a very interesting book called “Food Plants of China” by a Dr. Shiu-Ying Hu (a very accomplished Chinese botanist who lived to 102!). I’ve seen previews of this book online in which it talks about the silverweed plant so I’ll try and get myself a copy

• Speaking of books, I will do some more mining of Google Books and Google Scholar for interesting sources of silverweed knowledge, and more generally, the Potentilla family. I’m especially interested in this as I came across another beautiful species of the Potentilla family, Potentilla sanguinea. It has the lovely common name of Crimson Cinquefoil. I want to know whether it is edible (of course). I think it was this species anyway, there are so many. I will need to go back to the nursery to verify.

• I now have less nervousness about the robustness of silverweed, they seem almost indestructible.