Honey Underground

I’m looking for dried grasses and driftwood to make a small fire while Alan sets up the Ghillie kettle to boil us a brew. For a moment, I think I’m seeing the summer sun reflecting back at me off the dune grasses. But it’s a mass of feathery leaves, glowing as silver as the skin of a hundred

minnow when the sun catches them through the water. I get my head in among the tangled grasses and turn over a leaf. Sure enough, the underneath is whiter. It is definitely silverweed.

 

I had only ever read about silverweed, Potentilla anserina, and mostly in old herbals and books on traditional medicines of the highlands and islands. It’s meant to be easy to find on wastelands and in dry grassy places, it likes a cool coastal spot. Despite it being quite a common plant, I

hadn’t seen it or noticed it before today. This is since I became enlightened to this plant’s story. That it was once a core food source for the communities in the north west of Scotland, before the potato came to our shores in the 18th century.

 

A course in herbology – the study of plant lore – at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh, opened me up to the ancient practices of herbal medicine and our traditional uses of plants. Through my background reading for an essay, I encountered the story of silverweed and it sunk its

roots deep into my curious mind. Plants and ethnobotany — the study of our human relationship with plants – have become one of my greatest interests. A plant’s name can sometimes give away how we once, or perhaps still, consider it useful. When I first encountered plant lore, Lungwort (Pulmonaria officinalis) was the most revealing example. As the name suggests, lungwort was used to treat conditions of the lung. ‘Wort’ in its common name denotes it as a useful plant and ‘officinalis’ in its botanical name signals that it was once a staple of

an apothecary’s cabinet. Lung / Pulmonaria both indicated the part of the body it was used to treat. Herbalists today use it for stuffy chests, its mucilage content – a kind of gummy substance – helping to clear a cough or catarrh. I most commonly know it as a pretty garden plant, brightening up damp shady spots. Its small pink to blue to pink flowers give a subtle spring colour. White splotches on its lung-shaped leaves are an attractive feature for the gardener, but it was once believed to be the plant’s ‘signature’ – nature’s way of indicating its usefulness. The Doctrine of Signatures was a belief system developed in the 1500s. While Lungwort may still be used by herbalists today, there were many plants whose signatures turned out to be false.

 

What I take from the Doctrine of Signatures is to respect the skill of noticing the details, of the many ways in which nature signs the landscape. These signatures are all around us if we look and pay attention. It could be the rings hidden inside a tree’s core, a red sky in the morning or the

roaring of the sea. We are most familiar with the signatures of changing seasons. The excitement of robins being more visible, foraging in open ground as winter approaches and their food sources are scarcer. Leaves turning gold then amber then the colour of the earth as autumn

passes. Blossom snowing across a lawn in spring, or the summer sun and rain fattening our vegetables. Much closer to home for me, I see it in my cat’s coat becoming fluffier in autumn. And then in spring, the shedding begins, with clouds of hair collecting around the edges of our living room.

 

While our beliefs become more and more influenced by science, our noticing can become more detailed and more specialist. Some plant names slip out of relevance or everyday use, but the story remains. The naming of plants is a legacy that feels to me like an ancestral signature, giving us a small story in a couple of words. We may learn the uses of the plant, who named or bred it, where it may have come from. We now also recognise that there is a darker history of slavery or colonialism lurking in many of the botanical plant names. The scientific method of naming plants, an attempt to catalogue through a standard classification system, often squashes the tactile cultural diversity of the history of these plants.

 

My love of language and ethnobotany means that I am most drawn to the common names of plants. Silverweed, like all plants, has one botanical name, Potentilla anserina, but it could have a hundred common names across the world. The English common name silverweed does little to let us know about its practical uses. The word weed by current connotations suggests it as a bit of a nuisance, although these associations are thankfully changing. As I dug deeper into the history of this plant, I discovered that silverweed was far from troublesome for the communities in the Outer Hebrides, a chain of Atlantic islands off Scotland’s far north west coast. It grows on the undulating machair – from the Gaelic meaning fertile – grasslands and along the white sandy beaches. The long roots were used for centuries, perhaps even as far back as 4000 BC, as a starchy staple, ground down to a powder to make breads or puddings, snacked on raw by children playing in the dunes, or roasted for dinner in the embers of a peaty fire. This practice preceded and overlapped with the introduction of the potato in the mid-18th century.

 

Every part of the plant is edible, but it was the nutty, carrot-like brisgean or briosglan (roots) that gave nourishment and sustenance. One of the plant’s Gaelic names, An seachdamh aran (the seventh bread), is very telling of its local story. Meanwhile, its Scots equivalents, dog-tansy, moor-grass, fair-days, swine’s-grass, tell another tale. I first read a poem, or maybe it’s a song, about silverweed in Tess Darwin’s The Scots Herbal, a compendium of her extensive research to learn more about the lore of plants she was encountering in her work as a ranger and ecologist in the Cairngorms.

 

    Honey under ground

    Silverweed of spring.

    Honey and condiment

    Whisked whey of summer.

    Honey and fruitage

    Carrot of autumn.

    Honey and crunching

    Nuts of winter.

 

This poem, translated from Gaelic, is in my mind as I survey the plant among the grassland and dunes here at Portencross, a habitat quite similar to the machair of the Hebrides. Rushes, sandworts, sea plantain and arrowgrass grow on undulating sand flats, the grasses are richly punctuated with flowers of scentless mayweed and sea asters. I stroke the white hairs on the underside of a silverweed leaf and it feels as soft as the fur on my cat’s belly. My fingers trace along the red creepers which dart out in straight lines and criss cross to form a patchwork of

plantlife on fresh areas of sand.

I contemplate every inch of its form. I see its strength, its fortitude, its beauty, its story. In the harshest of weathers and the harshest of times, it endures. It is easy to get caught in the romanticism for how things used to be, especially when reading about the historical uses of

plants. This usually happens to me when I’m feeling a bit tired or disconnected after a busy week or month or year. Picking up an old herbal book, making a jar of foraged bramble jam, or nibbling on blaeberries on a walk in the hills becomes an accidental countermeasure. It becomes a way to root myself back to the earth through the simple routine of food.

 

It makes sense to me that crofters in the highlands and islands would opt for the convenience of cultivating a more productive and profitable crop, the potato. They weren’t to know that 100 years after its introduction, in 1846, that a fungal disease of the crop would sweep through Northern Europe, causing famine and the deaths of over 1 million people in nearby Ireland and would also come to their land. Potato blight devastated crops and forced thousands of people into poverty. A complicated mix of economic, political and land management failings saw destitution being remedied by mass emigration. The islands lost a third of their population due to the Clearances that followed with many boarding ships to Australia or Canada.

 

Scotland returned to the potato. Today it is a staple, farmed on a massive scale with potato farming using over 28,000 hectares of land. Silverweed appears in a few herbal medicine books, but I’m surprised that it is rarely mentioned in a forager’s guide. I have a 1983 edition of Wild Food by Roger Phillips. Wild Food is a collection of recipes of the traditional ways of cooking wild plants, recipes which Phillips has foraged from old cookery books and friends. His photos bring me back to it’s glossy pages again and again. It is a forager’s food porn. Before food blogs and Instagram, there were Phillips’ photos and personal reflections on recipes. In one scene I see a wooden serving board laid out on the grass displaying a selection of untarnished inkcap mushrooms, two baked eggs with cleanly broken shells on the side and a scattering of garlic cloves to finish. In most of his pictures there’s a glass of wild wine illuminated by the sun and a picturesque landscape behind.

 

When I get to the silverweed entry Phillips reports: “I have no joy eating this plant. The roots are generally too small to be worthwhile, so how whole populations of Scottish islanders lived on them I cannot imagine.”

 

The wind snaps at Alan and me as I add splinters of wood to the fire under our Ghillie kettle. Alan is lying back, eyes closed, maybe a little bit asleep. We’d been mostly working at home in the city for over a year during the Covid-19 pandemic, working among piles of furniture, tools, boxes and increasing layers of dust while we spruced our home up for sale. We’ve moved into my parents home for a few months while we wait for our next chapter to begin in a new home on the coast.

 

Our little post-lockdown trips have become a way to connect with the world outside of us and to connect with each other beyond the domestic, at a time we’re feeling a bit rootless, a bit adrift. Despite the wind, the clouds seem to be still. I pull the zip up on my jacket and stoke the fire. A rapid crescendo of the curlew call breaks through and a low whistle begins to rise from the kettle.

 

I look around to see where the curlew call might be coming from but the strength of the wind deceives me. I hear distant chatter and a dog bark as people walk towards the carpark. I can’t make out the direction of any of it. I decide not to harvest any silverweed, I couldn’t dig up a wild plant to get at the roots. Instead, I sip my tea and reach over and wriggle a finger into the sand to feel for the roots. They’re thin and stringy so I route around to find something more sturdy. There’s a thicker root which feels pliable like the end of a skinny parsnip. I break off a small piece, not enough to stunt the plant, and slip it into my pocket.

 

I make a plan to order seeds to grow our own silverweed in our new coastal garden. It will take a few years for them to establish, for the roots to grow fatter and longer. To be sufficient for a meal. Once they’re ready, we will look out the Ghillie kettle, put on our big coats and roll up a rug. We’ll collect some wood and dried out bracken and sit on the beach with our harvested roots and let them roast in the embers of a driftwood fire. While we wait, I might eat some raw as we watch a dog chase a raggedy ball along the beach or a cormorant fish for their dinner. Watching out over the sea, gulls overhead, curlews calling the day to a close, we’ll watch the sun set over the silhouette of the backlit hills. I will find joy in every nutty bite, my honey of autumn.

 

For now, we settle for something familiar.

 

“Chips?” Alan asks.

 

“Chips,” I say.

 

We pack up and drive up the coast to Largs. Walking along the front, we’re hit with the smell of fresh churros, hot slices of pizza. The doo, doo, ping of arcade games. Children chase each other, one girl has pink ice cream running from the sides of her mouth, and she’s laughing so hard she can’t keep up with the others. Outside the chip shop is the sculpture of a short, rotund Viking with ginger hair and a red face. He’s tucking into a punnet of chips. We order two regular’s which come wrapped in honey-coloured paper. We find a bench on the pier where we can watch the ferries that traverse back and forth from the Isle of Cumbrae. A seagull paces along the grassy bank behind us as we slip our fingers under the paper and eat each steaming hot chip fast before it has a chance to swoop. The chips warm our bellies, they’re fat and soft in the middle, a bit crispy on the edges and covered in lashings of malt vinegar and salt. We eat every last one.

 

I reach into my pocket to feel for my scrap of silverweed root and realise that it is gone.