The English Yew, Taxus bacata--Ordinary and Fabled

My earliest memory of yew is from a poem. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a historical novel, The White Company, as well as his Sherlock Holmes mysteries (The White Company).  As a teen I loved the book, and remember clearly a poem from it, celebrating a company of medieval archers, which goes in part, 

"What of the bow?

    The bow was made in England:

Of true wood, of yew-wood,

    The wood of English bows;

         So men who are free

         Love the old yew-tree

And the land where the yew-tree grows." (link),

of true wood, of yew-wood

English yews, Taxus bacata, as ornamentals

Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver, British Columbia

 In August,  I took a garden tour of Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. One of the important gardens on the tour was the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver.

pond and willow, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden

Classical Chinese gardens date back to at least the Southern Song Dynasty (960-1279). They were best developed as the retirement retreats of government bureaucrats. The owner set rocks, plants, and water around his home, to have pleasing and different views in all directions. In southern and coastal China, the house could be quite open, the garden and the indoors linked most of the year. 

Stinging Nettles Part II: FIber, Dye, and Folklore

Stinging nettles, Urtica dioica (nettle family, Urticaceae) have been used for food and medicine for millennia (see previous blog link). 

Fiber

They have also been used to make cloth and rope. The individual stalks do not branch and so contain fibers that can be four feet long. These can be separated from the surrounding plant tissue and braided or twined into thread or twine and then used to make items from soft cloth and fish nets to rope. Online videos show people stripping the leaves and outer stem off stinging nettles without gloves, so apparently you can grip it firmly at the base and avoid contact with the stinging hairs. Once the outer layers are removed the long fibers are pliable and can be twisted or braided while fresh or softened further in an alkaline bath. link The older literature mentions weaving nettles into table cloths and sheets. It could be bleached very white. In Germany, nettle fiber was used to supplement cotton into the 20th century. Using stinging nettle for its fibers goes back millennia, but is pretty much a forgotten art in western culture. 

stinging nettle, Urtica dioica

Stinging Nettle, Urtica dioica Stinging and Useful

Stinging nettle is a plant that too many of us only criticize. It stings! The tiny venom-filled hairs on the leaves are really painful to brush against. So suburbanites, farmers, hikers, hunters and many others,  dislike it; it stings, it makes places that you go around rather than through, nasty plant. 

stinging nettle, Urtica dioica

And yet, this is an excellent vegetable and healing herb. Heat the leaves and the stinging hairs are quickly destroyed, leaving rich, nutritious greens. For millennia people gathered stinging nettles for food and medicine. Today that is rare or confined to commercial medical production, so we only see them as irritating.