The garden is all heat and light on this summer afternoon, pulsing and multilayered with insect sounds and constant movement.
Wild flowers jostle with the cultivated, in varieties chosen for their nectar and pollen. Bumblebees wiggle up into the blue throats of viper’s bugloss, hoverflies taste scabious, dabbing with their tongues, soldier beetles clamber over wild carrot, bumping into each other before hurriedly parting.
I grow white rosebay willowherb, food plant of the elephant hawk-moth caterpillar, and greater bellflower, which lives on woodland edges and river banks in the north of England.
Threading through these flower borders is melancholy thistle, Cirsium heterophyllum. Another northern species, once abundant in upland hay meadows, it has found sanctuary on roadsides.
Drive through the north Pennines in July and the banks and verges are an exhilaration of purple flowers. In my garden they stand above geraniums and alliums on tall dark ridged stems that are coated in cottony hairs. On a gusty day, the wind flips up the leaves revealing silver undersides. They are soft and unprotected by spines.
I can see all stages of the flower at once. Flat-topped buds are encased in red-tipped scales that will darken to purple as the flowers age. The fully open flower heads are magenta shaving brushes lighted on by hoverflies and bees. I give a tug to a silver seed head, which expands slowly and softly in my hand, warm as eiderdown.
This plant was once used to cure depression or melancholy. Nicholas Culpeper in his Complete Herbal of 1653 wrote that “the decoction of the thistle in wine being drank, expels superfluous melancholy out of the body, and makes a man as merry as a cricket; … my opinion is, that it is the best remedy against all melancholy diseases”.
Following the doctrine of signatures, where a resemblance was seen between a plant and an ailment, its use might have been indicated by its often single flowers which in immaturity may tilt to one side. I find simply seeing this beautiful thistle uplifting. Worth risking it spreading through my borders, for it’s a wildflower that shouts joy.
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