We decided to expand on my Plant - Leaves study and on the way home from walking my little sister to school this morning we spend sometime ambling along the woodland paths collecting all the different leaves we could find. We came back with over 30. Many of them we know the names of and some we dont.
I am doing a powerpoint presentation on each of the plants we know and hoping to find the names of the plants we dont know.
I am also going to get my dad to make me a "flower/leaf press" so that I can press the leaves and collect them and then I am going to start my own nature study scrap book.
I found a wonderful blog whilst I was reseraching my first plant. We know it by the name of Poor Mans Potato and could not find a reference to that name anywhere on the www. We then looked through a book we have called "healing Thread" tradional medicines of the Highlands and Islands (Scotland) and found the name Silverweed.
I then seached Silverweed and found this: http://radix4roots.blogspot.com/2011/02/another-root-less-travelled-silverweed.html - it has a lot of info on Silverweed.
Here in the Hebrides it is a well known fact that people survived the Great Pototo famine by eating the small tubers of the Silverweed/Poor mans Pototo around the time of the Clearances.
I noticed from all the info that you can apparently eat the tubers raw or cooked by think it need s a lot more investigation from me before I try it out!
WARNING: Identifying plants is very complex and trying out plant that you only think are the right plant can be fatal. You just need to look at the movie: Into the Wild - where the guy died from incorrectly identifying a plant when he was short of food. Don't do it! You need to cross reference and study the plant in detail i.e. roots, leaves, flowers etc before you every try something like that. We have books of wild foraging and herbal books, traditional books, ancient books but still we are very wary of actually trying stuff unless we have studied it over time and are 110% certain.
I will tell you more about my project as it progresses as it will be a study of a couple of days.
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Other good references:
http://www.floranordica.org/index.en.html - Flora Nordica is a research project with the aim to produce a scientifically based flora of the vascular plants in northern Europe. (i.e. Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway (incl. Svalbard and Jan Mayen) and Sweden.)
http://www.cas.vanderbilt.edu/bioimages/tree-key/simple-leaf-trees.htm - simple leaved trees
How to press flowers http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/articles/pressing-flowers.aspx
Quote: "Blessed silverweed of spring, the seventh bread of the Gael. I’ve been speaking about the silverweed. The old Gaels were eating it. Sometimes they were growing it. The silverweed is the seventh bread. What are the other six?
ReplyDeleteIn the book The Gaelic
Otherworld, Ronald Black looks at
that question. Here is his conclusion:
oat-bread, barley-bread, rye-bread,
pease-bread, wheaten bread and
ginger bread. And the seventh one –
silverweed bread.
In Carmina Gadelica, we are told
that the people were grinding the dry root of the silverweed. They were making meal. They were making
bread or porridge with the meal. Also they were eating the roots – raw or boiled or roasted.
The silverweed was important at
time of famine. Some people in Uist
kept themselves alive on silverweed
and shellfish. That was when they
were homeless at the time of the
Clearances."
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/alba/foghlam/learngaelic/anlitirbheag/pdf/301_400/litirbheag357.pdf