Life

Take On Nature: Ophelia's weedy trophies

Stephen Colton

Stephen Colton

Take on Nature columnist for The Irish News.

Purple Loosestrife or Lythrum salicaria, with its erect reddish-purple stems and long green leaves, provides a valuable source of nectar for many insects
Purple Loosestrife or Lythrum salicaria, with its erect reddish-purple stems and long green leaves, provides a valuable source of nectar for many insects Purple Loosestrife or Lythrum salicaria, with its erect reddish-purple stems and long green leaves, provides a valuable source of nectar for many insects

THE much-needed rains of late, carried by soft westerly winds, have brought a lushness to our countryside. Vigorous growth is evident all around with striking spikes of Purple Loosestrife rising above grasses and other wildflowers.

Dense stands of the magenta flowers will be an ever-present feature of our marshes, riverbanks and meadows from now through to September. Lythrum salicaria, with its erect reddish-purple stems and long green leaves, provides a valuable source of nectar for many insects including the Brimstone butterfly and the gold and pink Elephant Hawk moth.

Known also as Purplegrass, Stray-by-the-lough and Long purples, the latter of these alternatives has been the cause of some confusion around artistic detail in Ophelia, the 1851 oil painting by John Everett Millais. The famous piece portrays Ophelia, a female character from Shakespeare's Hamlet, floating and singing before she drowns without resistance.

In the play, Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, Queen of Denmark describes how the unhappy Ophelia adorned herself with willow branches and wildflowers, before "her weedy trophies and herself, fell in the weeping brook", bringing about her watery demise.

Gertrude announces:

"There is a willow grows aslant the brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

Therewith fantastic garlands did she come

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them."

Before going on to say:

"Her garments, heauy with her drinke,

Pul'd the poore wretch from her melodious lay,

To muddy death."

The artist Millais interpreted the "long purples" as being purple loosestrife and included them in his painting, but it is widely accepted the flowers in the Bard's play were in fact Early Purple Orchids, which also have spikes of rich purple-pink flowers.

Botanist, Sidney Beisly writing in 1864 identified the "long purples" without question as being "the early purple orchis (Orchis Mascula) which blossoms in April and May. The flowers are purple, numerous and in long spikes".

Shakespeare's own references to its other names is further proof of their identity, with the "dead-men's-fingers" name coming from the pale palmate or finger like roots of several common orchid species. The shepherds' 'grosser' name alludes to the plant's two bulbs or tubers and its Greek botanical name, Orchis, which I will let you decipher.

Although one of its Irish names, Créachtach, translates as 'wound herb', there is little evidence that it was ever used to treat wounds in Ireland. Instead, it was used to treat diarrhoea and dysentery, while in parts of Donegal, according to Hart in The Flora of the County Donegal (1898), dye was made from the plant.

Rarely used today, Loosestrife has for centuries been highly regarded and valued by herbalists and apothecaries. The 17th century herbalist Culpeper preferred purple loosestrife over 'eyebright' for treating eye ailments, saying that it "cureth the eyes and preserved the sight".

Roman naturalist Pliny the Younger stated that it "dissolved strife" among farm animals, this probably because of its insect-repelling qualities – also, no doubt, the reason why farmers used to hang the plants around the yokes of their oxen and workhorses.

Mrs. Grieve in A Modern Herbal (1931) writes that an infusion made from the plant, "cures quinsy or a scrofulous throat".

Inevitably, long purples have found their way into poetic verse, with John Clare recalling in Joys of Youth how "oft long purples on the water's brink/Have tempted me to wade, in spite of fate/To pluck the flowers".

In The Ice-Cream Man, our own Michael Longley lists it among "all the wild flowers of the Burren/I had seen in one day".