Hedgeside Wisdom

One of the strangest garden plants, I always think. Like its contemporary spring bulbs, it appears from nowhere and then grows with astonishing speed to produce stems much more robust and enduring than those of snowdrops, bluebells or daffodils. It does not produce bulbs, but it has thick roots that store nutrients from season to season, giving it the kick start it needs. Given the chance, its foliage also outlasts the fleshy bluebells and the rest - squirreling away carbohydrate into those roots. One year, here, it did not have that chance - we had an explosion of Solomon's Seal Sawfly larvae: highly active, writhing caterpillars, that stripped it of leaves within a few days. If it ever happens again, it's a blip certainty

I looked up why it is called Solomon's Seal. Solomon of course was a king of the tribes of Israel, three thousand years ago (if he existed at all - inevitably, that is disputed), depicted in Hebrew scripture as both wise and ostentatiously wealthy. The signet ring seal that he used to verify correspondence has achieved mystical significance within both Judaism and Islam. It includes a star, which is depicted as both six-pointed (the Jewish star of David) and a pentagram - present on the flag of Morocco, and as a pervasive image throughout the Islamic world, bleeding into occult traditions in the west. Allegedly, the image of the seal can be found in those fleshy roots - either on the surface or if the root is cut

The plant was once classified as part of the lily family. In the Christian gospels, Jesus reassures his disciples that they need not preoccupy themselves with worldly concerns like having enough clothes: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." I supoose it depends on whether you consider photosynthesis to be a form of molecular spinning, and the active transport of the resulting carbohydrates to storage organs to be toil

King Solomon, if he existed, may or may not have written the Hebrew book of proverbs. So he might have appreciated that, on a day of continuous rain from daylight until (almost) dark, the upside was that I could take a picture against the sky without blacking out the foreground. Every cloud...