September Calendar 2016: Wall Barley

September: Wall Barley

On the Coastal Walk

Hordeum murinum
Order: Poales
Family: Poaceae
Genus: Hordeum

habitat: open coastal space
distribution: widespread in the south

Wall barley is a species of grass, grows in grassland, abandoned wasteland, and wherever the seeds are scattered like roadside. It looks like barley.  But it is just, so called, a weed.  This is why it has an unwelcoming name, false barley.  However, a weed is a wild plant.  Cultivated plant were cultivated from wild plants so that human could digest them better and/or they could taste better(sweeter, milder, softer etc.) for human.

Anyway, it was a stunning view at a beach cliff when we were walking on a windy weekend, like (conventional) barley field.  The spiky sun-bleached yellow ochre grass heads were bending, swinging, this way, another way, as the wind from the sea blew over them.

The blue sky looks more blue and clear; the sunlight comes from farther back.  Autumn has come.

August Calendar 2016: Nettle

August: Nettle

Stingy Herb

Urtica dioica
Order: Rosales
Family: Urticaceae
Genus: Urtica

habitat: sunny to shady spot
distribution: throughout British Isles

Mid summer, mature grasses turn yellow and ochre, which add the autumnal tone in the meadows.

Nettle, well-known as stinging nettle, are flourishing almost everywhere we walk in the meadows, along roadside.  Unless you are careful, the notorious hairs allover the plants sting your bare skin, which causes very unpleasant painful stinging sensation for a while.

I read a fairy-tale about a poor princes and her 11 brother princess as a child.  The brothers were changed into swans by a witch. (It was the story in an Andersen's fairy tale)  When I knew this stingy plant was called nettle, I suddenly remembered this tale.  The princess had to collect with her bear hands and stamp with her bare feet to make vests for her brothers in order to rescue them.  At that time I read it, I couldn't imagine what nettle looked like because I was in Japan as a child, where no nettle grew.  I just imagined how painful and unpleasant her task could have been.

You shouldn't scratch or rub where itches because as the toxic chemicals(histamine and acetylcholine) are injected into the skin through very tiny needle-like tubes and it worsens the symptom.  The NHS Choices describes that in case of being stung by nettle rubbing dock leaves on the rash, which neutralises the chemicals of nettle sting.  But better to avoid touch/brush nettle at all.

So unpopular plant has been widely used for food, medicine, textiles and so forth.  I've never cooked its leaves, but have had a nettle soup as a starter in a restaurant in Swiss Alps.  The creamy soup had lightly sour grassy taste.  I forgot the main and the dessert but can still remember the soup as it was so impressive to me that the nettle, the wild plant, was used for dish in a restaurant.

Young leaves in the spring (to the early summer) are used for food. Now toward the end of the summer, nettle has creamy yellow (some spices have pinkish or light green ones.)flowers, which hang from its leaf axils like a small hairy balls.

Cicely Mary Barker, the illustrator well known for the flower fairies in the early 20th century, hasn't create a nettle fairy.  Sorry for nettle!