October 2017 — Enchanter's nightshade

Hanging baskets have improved in recent years. Many exciting new plants have been introduced yet there is an old faithful which remains popular – Trailing Lobelia. This South African plant, perhaps most effective in blue or white shades, was named in honour of Mathias de l’Obel (1538–1616) the Belgian physician to King James I, and a noted botanist. A portrait of him shows a bluff, sturdy fellow with an impressive beard.

 

Enchanter’s Nightshad

    De l’Obel was responsible for the curious name attached to a fairly common wild plant. Enchanter’s Nightshade occurs as a persistent garden weed and a spreading colony grows in some local woodland. Despite the quaint name, there is nothing exotic about Enchanter’s Nightshade. It is modest and low-growing with minute white flowers and is not a nightshade. D l’Obel and fellow botanists were pioneers in the field and employed considerable scholarship and imagination in the naming of plants as they catalogued them in a systematic way. Ancient writings mentioned magical plants seemingly connected with the enchantress Circe and the scientific name Circaea was attached to this lowly weed. Nightshades were held to possess sinister powers and our plant became known as Enchanter’s Nightshade.

     The enchantress Circe appears in the Greek epic Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses and his crew, during their adventurous return from the Trojan War, land on an island controlled by the beautiful Circe who changes some of the men into pigs. Ulysses, assisted by Hermes, undoes the spell, thereby saving their bacon. The Odyssey is thought to have originate during the eighth-century BC.

The nightshades, poisonous relatives of the potato and tomato, are famously represented by Deadly Nightshade. A plant of this species once grew by our church vestry steps. It has strange brown and maroon flowers which develop into toxic black berries and the plant yields the drug atropine, invaluable in eye surgery.

First published in October 2017