MUCH of the countryside presents as a calendar for the changing year, where nature continues to evolve, wax and wane as the months pass by.
Nowhere is this more evident than along our roadside verges and ditches, where the spring flowers of forget-me-not and speedwell have given way to summer’s offering of tall grasses, loosestrife, bramble and - particularly now, on upright reddish stems - meadowsweet and its frothy clusters of flowerheads.
An important food plant for the larvae of some moth species, including the emperor moth, the plant gives off a heavy musky aroma, flourishing in damp, swampy soils. Its name comes from the old English name Meodu-swete meaning ‘Mead Sweetener’, used as it was to flavour mead, beer, wine and other drinks from early times, referenced in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as ‘meadwort’ just one of many ingredients for a drink called ‘save’.
The plant was also known as a strewing herb, strewn across floor surfaces to give places a pleasant fragrance, and sometimes called ‘bridewort’ as it was used for that purpose in churches at weddings.
Known for its medicinal benefit, meadowsweet contains salicylic acid and has long been used as a painkiller. In the 19th century, scientists isolated salicylic acid from the flower, created a synthetically altered version, acetylsalicylic acid, and sold it in tablet form as ‘aspirin’.
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Meadowsweet’s long history of use by humans as a healing herb and a sweet-smelling plant has ensured a rich repository of fascinating history and folklore exists about the plant. Druids considered the plant to be a sacred herb, and in 2009 archaeologists found bunches of meadowsweet in a Bronze Age grave at Forteviot, south of Perth, Scotland.
These were complete blossoms and prove that these flowers were used in ancient burials at the time. Dr Kenneth Brophy from the University of Glasgow said the flowers “Don’t look very much, just about three or four millimetres across. But these are the first proof that people in the Bronze Age were actually placing flowers in with burials.”
In Ireland, druids used meadowsweet in remedies for gastric and inflammatory conditions. According to Irish Legend, noted by Mac Coitir in Irish Wild Plants, Myths, Legends & Folklore (2006), it was the land goddess of Munster, Áine, who gave meadowsweet its perfume. Cúchulainn also was linked with the plant, supposedly bathing in meadowsweet and water to help calm his fits of rage, and given the Irish name, Crios Conchulainn, Cúchulainn’s Belt.
Cúchulainn also was linked with the plant, supposedly bathing in meadowsweet and water to help calm his fits of rage, and given the Irish name, Crios Conchulainn, Cúchulainn’s Belt
In more recent decades, meadowsweet has also been used to treat a variety of ailments, some of which are recorded in the schools’ section of the National Folklore Collection compiled by Irish school children in the 1930s. These include stories of the plant being used to treat diarrhoea, as a remedy for kidney trouble and as ‘a cooling drink in hot weather’ after boiling the flowers, straining and allowing to cool.
Flowering from late June through August into September, Ballyshannon’s William Allingham, writes fondly of meadowsweet, in his poem of the same name:
“Through grass, through amber’d cornfields, our slow Stream
Fringed with its flags and reeds and rushes tall,
And Meadowsweet, the chosen of them all
By wandering children, yellow as the cream
Of those great cows.”
On the early morning just after finishing this piece, I walked a laneway of Necarne Estate in Irvinestown, Co Fermanagh, my dog Oisín for company. There on either side were continuous lines of thick clusters of meadowsweet, which as John Clare says, through the “darksome green, shone in the merry light”.
They filled the air with their heady scent, standing tall on centuries of legend and lore.