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Ancient herbs harken to spirit world

The plants of the world of Harry Potter
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Gardening

By Michael Lascelle

I was driving to work on the Abernethy connector a few weeks ago and there it was – a recently pollarded Salix that looked just like the ‘Whomping Willow’ of Harry Potter fame.

Then there was my new gardening book on edible ornamental plants that I had just finished editing, which features a plant called the American Mandrake, which elicited memories of the screaming Mandrake root my kids found so fascinating back when Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets first came out.

Finally, there was a scuba diving vacation to the Bahamas and Florida last year that included a side trip to Harry Potter World, which turned out to be quite an immersive experience – although any suggestion that I was wearing a cape and brandishing a wand are pure nonsense.

Given all these synchronistic happenstances, my next topic for this column almost seemed chosen for me, as if by magic, and even though J.K. Rowling’s accounts of a young wizard are fictitious (sorry, real believers), much of the plant lore does have a grain of truth to it.

Let’s start with the Whomping Willow, that hulk of a tree with club-like branches and a short temper.

Those clubs or short branches with swollen ends are the result of pollarding, an age-old pruning practice that dates back to ancient Rome.

This system of cutting all the sprouting branches back annually was adopted to provide a steady supply of new growth for livestock feed, fuel or even weaving wattle fences, which were a staple back in the Middle Ages.

The creative licence portion of this story is the actual attack, as most of us know that trees will sway in the wind but those that move are limited to much smaller flora, such as Venus fly traps or sensitive plant (Mimosa).

The screaming mandrake root is a real plant species, Mandragora officinarum, which in early herbals, was shown to have both male or female human-shaped roots.

The actual screaming was also a widely held belief, so much so that dogs were used to pull the plants up using a rope so the gardeners could keep a safe distance from the maddening cries of the harvested mandrake.

Wolfsbane is another ancient herb that also goes by the Latin title of Aconitum or Monkshood, which is a reference to the flower’s resemblance to a medieval hooded monk.

This was used in a potion by professor Remus Lupin (who is a werewolf) to control his monthly transformation during the full moon.

While this fictional account does have some truth to it – Aconitum was mixed with honey and glass to create deadly bait used during the Middle Ages as a protection from werewolves – the problem was that it killed many of Europe’s indigenous wolves.

You can find these attractive perennials at most garden centres in spring but it is used today strictly as an ornamental, as it is considered poisonous.

Even the wood used to make the magic wands had some significance – with Harry’s wand being made of holly (a Celtic symbol of resurrection) and Tom Riddle’s from yew, a symbol of death that was often planted on top of graves.

Last, but not least, is the Devil’s Snare from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

This man-eating plant was inspired by a fictitious account made by a 19th-century explorer named Carl Liche, who described a tree-like carnivorous plant that ate a woman whole somewhere in the dark recesses of what was then the unknown continent of Africa.

Mike Lascelle is a local nursery manager and gardening author.

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