Cumulus blooms of hogweed echo the sky – big, white, lumpy clouds full of light and rain, full of energy and swagger. Sunlight catches on rough hairs, silvering the ridged, hollow stems that change from purple to green and rise a stately two metres.
Crowded along a fence between fields, out of reach and, mercifully, unmanaged, the hogweeds have grown thick and tall, their umbels opening winey pink, then turning brilliant white like starched doilies. “Hogweed” sounds like an insult compared with other wildflower names, but it’s loaded with the poetry of the commonplace, a functional earthiness.
Its scientific name is Heracleum, named after the monster-bashing god-hero Hercules. When many people kept a pig, they collected hogweed to feed it. I don’t know anyone who does that now, but the plant retains its name and the coarse, rude, porcine beauty that goes with it. Pigs don’t eat it but I’ve read wild food blogs from people who do, and love very young shoots and flower buds fried in butter.
Anyone who’s cut hogweed with a strimmer and received sores and welts knows all about phytophotodermatitis, the caustic effect of its sap on skin exposed to bright sunlight. This is mild compared to giant hogweed, outlaw plants from the Caucasus that are huge and toxic (I must admit to a fascination with these fantastically architectural, dangerous plants).
The chemical properties of hogweeds and the other plants of the Umbelliferae botanical family are complex and have ancient links with society: carrot, coriander, parsley, fennel, dill, chervil, pignut, sweet cicely, hemlock, angelica, alexanders, caraway, lovage, burnet-saxifrage, celery, parsnip, samphire – there is a long list of wild and cultivated umbellifers that have culinary, medicinal and ritual importance.
Some may be mildly narcotic, some are murderously deadly, but from the bow wave of cow parsley on the lanes to the suds of ground elder escaping under the garden fence, these foamy flowers are far more important to insects. The flowers are stages for the dramas of bees, hoverflies, beetles and true flies – saving the insects is the last great labour of Hercules.
