Friday 22 July 2011

I can and I will…

They call this a weed, but just look at it this is no weed. This is a colourful, strong, magnificent plant that if it were a little scarcer, a little harder to grow, maybe not quite as invasive, would be growing at the backs of mixed borders all over the country – and I mean by design, not through laziness.

The Rosebay Willowherb is everywhere and anywhere: waste ground, embankments, rocky places, mountain scree, open woodland, my garden, it’s even been recorded as high up as 1,850 feet in Britain.

It wasn’t always so common though. Up until the Second World War it was quite an unusual sight. Then, for some reason, it began to become abundant on the bomb sites left by Hitler’s bombing raids. It soon spread as Britain rebuilt and began springing up all over the country in burned areas and forest clearings. On the Isle of Wight, it suddenly appeared like a deep pink fire on an area of woodland destroyed by a real fire in 1909.

It tolerates acid and alkaline soils, grows in wet conditions as well as on dry sandy heaths and chalk downs and is happy in shade, full sunshine, and just about any other climatic condition. It thrives wherever it sets down seed, from mineshaft entrances to the top fields of hills and mountains everywhere like these beauties in Wales.

I guess that you could say it’s adaptable, a survivor, and maybe that’s why I like it so much. But I can’t pass a clump without being blow away by its vivid pinkness. Their colour seems so optimistic, so full of life and it seems to shout ‘I can’t be beaten, I can and I will!’

No not a weed. Not a weed at all.

2 comments:

  1. Just catching up with your blogs. It's nice to be back.

    It is said a weed is just a plant in the wrong place which is a good definition. So in this case the Rosebay Willowherb by brightening up waste ground must surely be in the right place. As you say, "Not a weed at all." Common Bindweed has a nice flower too but they are very invasive and not well liked.

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  2. Phil Morgan commented on Facebook:
    In the US it's called Fireweed, I rather like it - not a weed, quite right.

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