July 20 - Day 98 - 'Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste' Shakespeare

This morning was another lovely morning and so I stopped by the stream (location of Canada Geese) to take some pictures of the wildflowers. I know this means that there have been two yellow flower pictures in two days - apologies - but for some reason I really liked the picture I’ve used today. I think yesterday’s flowers were Lesser spearwort (named for its spear-like leave), a type of buttercup as they are found along the edge of streams.

Today, the yellow daisy-like, yellow flowers, are I think common ragwort. Because they are often seen as a weed that can be harmful to livestock, I wanted to find out why so many plants have ‘wort’ in them.

Wort is a derivation of the Old English word wyrt and means root, herb or plant. Plants were given a name including wort if they were considered beneficial. The opposite of a wort was a weed, such as knotweed. This all seems a bit confusing to me, given the quote from Shakespeare and the difficulty in identifying weeds from plants (after all Jeff pulled up all my aquilegia, believing them to be weeds! You can imagine how grateful I was!)

On a slightly different note. I was at the Cutlers Hall this morning on behalf of St Wilfrid’s Centre, picking up a generous donation from the Cutlers Company Charitable Trust. There were a significant number and variety of charities there and it was wonderful to hear the work that everyone is doing. We are very grateful to the Trust and to all other organisations and individuals that make St Wilfrid’s Centre possible.

So whether weed or flower, they often fill the landscape with amazing colour and as Monty Don said, ‘Some plants become weeds simply by virtue of their success rather than any other factor.’ Which of course cannot be said of aquilegia plants!

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them. A. A. Milne