Rosebay Willow Herb

 Rosebay Willow Herb

At the beginning of the growing season I planted up containers for myself and my sister in law. This has turned out to be a bit of an experiment in plant car over the last two months.  As hers flourished and gave colour to her patio, ours have more or less withered and died back. I’d like to say that this is because I gave her all of my best annual bedding plants but there’s probably more to it than that. Her pots are watered regularly. She deadheads them often and gives them a bit of a feed now and again. I do none of the aforementioned as mine are more than three feet from the back door.

I have noticed a bit of an imbalance with how my vegetables are growing this year and it’s all down to feeding the soil and mulching. In areas close to the compost bins where the broccoli and beans are planted, things are doing really well. Further away from the compost bins it’s not the same story though as the luffas and kale struggle for nutrition. I think I have the reason. It is because when I emptied the compost bins in spring I just tipped them over and spread out the contents over the areas very close to the bins. 

It was very lazy on my part I admit, but my excuse is that the air came out of my wheelbarrow tyre so I couldn’t move the compost around the garden as easily. I could give a list of other excuses too but they are all as implausible, I was just lazy and like in most things in life, you get back what you put in. I’ll be mulching everywhere next year with manure, seaweed and compost to get things back on track.

Rosebay Willow Herb

 

When I was a lad I spent a lot of time in the back of cars with a bottle of pop and bag of crisps in car parks. I know teenagers do this voluntarily but I did it because my parents were in the pub. Because of this there are three plants that I look back on with a bit of nostalgia, honeysuckle, and bindweed are two of them as I used to pick them for something to do before it got dark in the car park. The third plant was the rosebay willowherb. One of the car parks was next to waste ground where the plants love to grow.

Rosebay willowherb, Chamerion angustifolium (also known as Epilobium angustifolium) is a widespread perennial plant and loves embankments, rocky places, mountain scree and open woodland.

The tall plant with small pink flowers is also known as Fireweed, particularly in North America, this name reflects the plant’s appearance following forest fires and other events which leave the earth scorched.It’s also called Bombweed because the plant quickly populated derelict bomb sites in the World Wars.

Rosebay willowherb flowers from June to September. Long seed pods form containing masses of hairy/fluffy seeds which are carried on the wind. There can be around 80,000 seeds per plant and some of these have been known to travel 100km.

The plant likes cleared woodland and early stages of coppicing but growth and flowering become restricted as the tree canopy develops again. In reclaimed bogs in Ireland it is an important early colonizer but disappears as the vegetation matures.

Rosebay willowherb tolerates shade and a broad range of climatic conditions and seems to thrive in both acid and alkaline soils.

Rosebay Willowherb Uses

The plant has been used for a lot of things over the year, from entertaining me as a child to natural cordage to fire-lighting to clothing to edible roots, shoots, leaves and flowers as well as numerous medicinal applications, some of which are still being investigated.

One use which was familiar to North American First Nations as well as to Kamchatkan reindeer herders, was consuming the pith from inside the stems – raw, cooked or fermented.

The most popular part of the plant is the inner section of the mature stem, called the pith. The pith falls somewhere between cucumber and unripe cantaloupe both in terms of texture and taste. 

It has some sweetness to it but sometimes also a slightly hot, peppery aftertaste. When collected up, the pith becomes more gelatinous and slimy and browns quite quickly, so it’s best eaten fresh.

The collected pith can be added to soups and broths both to thicken them and add extra carbohydrate content. It can also add a little flavour to otherwise bland concoctions.

Taking the pith from Fireweed is something which is easy to do, just peel back the stem. 

Other parts can be used too. The young shoots in spring are absolutely delicious blanched the growing tips dried as green tea. 

The raw baby plants can be used raw in sandwiches too.

Rosebay willowherb is one of the more useful wilderness plants but as always test a small bit first before cooking it up for the family.