Meetings with plants: agrimony
Bramble & Briar #122
Of all the plants that have found there own way into the garden, I think I might be most fond of the agrimony (church steeples or, most wonderfully, ‘sticklewort’, or Agrimonia eupatoria to get all binomial about things). I’m not quite sure when it arrived – there’s a chance it was here in the lawn all along, continually having its head lopped off until the first year we embraced No Mow May – but I don’t remember seeing it before about five years ago. Ours is a modest specimen – 20cm high at the most, less than half its full mature height – and it lives towards the edge of the grassy path that, this year, only really boasts any grass at the edges. I was worrying that we’d lost it, but the panic was previous and, sure enough, when I peered closely at the spot in question, there it was. Let me describe it for you.
There’s a short flower spike of custard yellow flowers with matching stamens, topped by brown anthers. The form of each bloom is not unlike – well, it sounds a bit odd, but I’m reminded of cherry blossom, if cherry blossom were much smaller, the colour of buttercups and arranged together on vanishingly short stems around a single spike. And maybe this isn’t as bonkers as it sounds, since both cherries and agrimony are in the Rosaceae family. The family resemblances don’t stop there, as the deeply lobed and pleated leaves are reminiscent of sanguisorba, or creeping cinqufoil.
It’s quite a hairy little beast, which makes distributing its seed capsules about the place relatively easy, since they’re just the kind of thing that will hitch a ride in the fur of a passing animal – hopefully, some will find their way into the soil. Admittedly, the seeds collected in the coats and ears of our two resident spaniels (mostly wood avens, with a sprinkling of forget-me-not and cleavers) end up in the vacuum cleaner, which I’m sure isn’t part of the plan. Agrimony will also expand its territory at the root, too, and I’m not sure if it’s anything more than wishful thinking, but I think our patch is growing, ever so slightly. For now, it seems to be just one plant, stubbornly clinging on at the edge of the path, reminding me that the garden would really quite like to be a meadow. It’s got to be better than a boring old lawn, hasn’t it?
