Weeds and the wisdom in the Middle Ages

Many plants we call weeds today were essential food in medieval times and they can still offer important benefits - nectar for helpful insects and protection for crops, according to Val Bourne*

Our medieval ancestors actively encouraged weeds in their vegetable plots.  The Fromond List, compiled by Surrey landowner Thomas Fromond in about 1525, is a list of 'herbys necessary for a gardyn'.  He recommends many of today's weeds for sauces, salads, soups and other dishes.  

As Sylvia Landsberg explains in The Medieval Garden (pub Museum Press), many weeds and self-seeding crops which today we would destroy were added to the cooking pot.  Our ancestors harvested chickweed, fat hen, ox tongue and sow thistle.  

Medieval gardeners relied on their 'weeds' because they filled the hungry gap between the end of winter crops and the beginning of summer ones.  

Strongly flavoured plants, such as annual brassica swine cress, added extra bite to bland potages.  We still devour watercress and lamb's lettuce today - and there are British native species of both.

Landsberg has designed several medieval gardens, including the Bayleaf Farm Garden at the Weald and Downland Museum, near Chichester (http://www.wealddown.co.uk/).

This was maintained, until his retirement, by a sharp-eyed gardener named Bob Holman.  He noticed that the weedy layer sheltered the larval stages of insects during winter and offered nectar for pollinators in spring and summer.

hoverfly

Holman also realised that different flowers attracted different insects.  The umbels (such as parsley, skirret, alexander and dill) were popular with predatory Ichneumon wasps, scourge of aphids.  Yellow and orange composite flowers, such as dandelions, lured adult hoverflies.  Holman found that one parasitic hoverfly larva was capable of eating 1,200 aphids before it pupates.  

He also noticed that white campion attracted blackfly, so he planted it near his beans - a crop targeted by blackfly - and watched as ladybird larvae avidly sucked up the pests.  Thus, it worked as a diversion and a sacrificial crop.

There was no bare soil in a medieval garden.  Every inch was covered with plants and this green mulch kept the soil moist.  In August, as flowering waned, the weed layer was dug in as a green manure, improving the soil structure.  So, although our ancestors nurtured the plants we now call weeds for food, the presence of such 'weeds' added much to the natural habitat too.

Landsberg, says that there is a shortage of documentation about pests and diseases in medieval sources but theorises that problems were more under control than these days.

Illustrated manuscript borders depicted the insects that played an important part in the medieval organic cycle.  'Ugly earthworms, slugs and larvae are not portrayed, but the attractive Our Lady's bird has spots that signify the seven sorrows of the Virgin'.

'Pollinating bees, predatory spiders, butterflies, aphid-eating lacewings and damsel flies can all be seen, as well as snails and predatory beetles', she says.

Perhaps our ancestors understood their relevance in the natural world far better than we do today.

Three step growing:  The medieval field system (see Laxton: http://www.laxtonvisitorcentre.org.uk/) relied on a simple three-year field rotation of pulses (ie beans and peas which could be dried), followed by grain, followed by a fallow year.  When fallow, these ridge and furrow fields were grazed and manured by the stock.

Medieval gardens followed the same three-year system - and it was the fallow plot which contained the weeds.


The garden was divided into short, narrow strips because the gardener leant over rather than walked on the soil.  The paths were certainly not mown and probably not scythed either, so they must have been rich in insects.

The illustrations in Thomas Hill's book of 1577, The Gardener's Labyrinth, show that the system and the beds looked very similar to modern raised 'no-dig' beds.

Companion planting is another 'modern' technique which the medieval gardeners practised.  Before the advent of the seed drill in the early years of the 18th century, seed was scattered by hand and not sown in rows.  

It's known that large amounts of seed were scattered in order to get a crop, far more than is used today.  Two or three crops were often sprinkled together and then, if one failed,another would hopefully survive.

The mixtures are mentioned in The Universal Gardener and Botanist: or a General Dictionary of Gardening by Thomas Mawe and John Abercrombie, in 1767.

One recipe consists of Cos lettuce, spinach and radishes.  This is simple companion planting, the principle being that mixtures of leaf confuse pests and therefore deter them - an idea today considered to be at the cutting-edge of pest control.

Today farming relies on monocultures that make it easy for pests to target crops.  In order to raise yields, pesticides and herbicides have been widely used and wild flowers (and weeds) have declined.  The knock-on effects on insect life, bird life and butterflies are well documented.

To counter this, the modern equivalent of fallow land is the wild flower strip left around commercial crops (encouraged by government grant).  Trendy beetle banks and insect habitat 'towers' also mimic the medieval habit of laissez-faire - not being too tidy.

Dr Rosemary Collier, director of research facility Warwick Crop Centre, has the difficult job of advising commercial growers on pests and diseases.  She says that the diversity of weeds and can have beneficial effects, for example weeds can act as companion plants in some cases, reducing colonisation by pests.

However, she acknowledges that some weeds and other wild species can and do harbour pests and diseases.

But, as herbicides become less effective because weeds build up resistance and the range of chemicals available to gardeners steadily swindles, there will come a point when we have no choice but to remove weeds physically.

We may yet see a day when weeds, or wild flowers, play a crucial role in our gardens, as they did for our medieval ancestors.


*  from an article in the Telegraph

Interesting: http://baronessys.zohrarawling.com/?p=34