Jim Howie writes a column about the history of blossom

Aug 18 2011 by Rachel Flint, Flintshire Chronicle

MEADOWSWEET – there’s a wild flower whose very name conjures up images of a perfect summer’s day.

This frothy mass of creamy-white blossom is well worth seeing down lanes these days, not only for its appearance but for its almost sickly sweet perfume, which some folk find a bit overpowering.

It’s a plant once used to sweeten up the smell of farmhouses by covering over the floor and after drying out the perfume is far more agreeable. Honestly! Definitely a nice change from farm beasts too more liberally scattered around in those days.

A member of the huge rose family the meadowsweet continues to blossom into September to bring a lingering trace of summer. By choice it likes a wet habitat and is more abundant in the West of Britain still reigning as Queen of the Meadows, what meadows are left.

Apart from use as floor coverings in farmhouses the plant was used to flavour a country drink, the once popular and still recommended mead. It was also considered a help in easing arthritis but don’t try your luck. A commodity from it was also a black dye.

A reader from Wardle who has visual impairment can no longer see well enough to distinguish individual birds with certainty, but he still gets much pleasure from them in his garden by what may seem an unusual food mix but which certainly attracts numerous birds in this country garden.

Each day Anthony France puts out a mixture of some hundred food ‘balls’, consisting of brown bread, toast, butter and jam.

‘It goes down well’, says Anthony, who mentions some of the birds that patronise this menu – thrushes, finches and the like. Now living in Wardle he has lived most of his life in the Beeston area.

He has heard several cuckoos this season which pleased him as much as an Upton couple were delighted to come across the now fairly rare spotted flycatchers. There was a pair of them near Chirk doing what these birds do so adroitly – flying off a branch to take passing insects. These birds, too, are in decline.

There are of course, some excellent bird mixes available at the moment, some specially aimed at a species, such as niger for goldfinches and mealworms for robins but my correspondent seems more than happy at what his own mixture is attracting.

It was like wandering through a sleet shower. What? On a summer’s day? Yes, but these were the flying parachute fruits of rosebay willow herb, their very abundance at the edge of the forest and making them seem a mini-storm. It’s been an abundant flower of high summer like its relative the great willow herb, a more hairy species with bigger but similarly coloured flowers. Now the willow-herb days are nearly over.