Meadowsweet

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Meadowsweet

***** Location: Ireland
***** Season: Summer
***** Category: Plant

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Explanation

Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria)
is a common fen plant growing amongst other tall herbs and forming extensive stands, to 1m or more. It is a a tall hairless perennial herb, growing in damp meadows, ditches and bogs, at the edges of ponds, on river banks and in damp open woodland.

It is common throughout Northern Ireland, as well as throughot other parts of Europe. It can also be found in the eastern US and Canada. The creeping rootstock sends up a reddish, angular stem, up to 120cm tall, branched near the top and bearing alternate long-petioled leaves composed of two to five pairs of ovate, serrate leaflets, which are green above but silvery below.

The small, sweet smelling, creamy-white five-petaled flowers with over twenty protruding stamens grow in panicled cymes from June to August. The flowers do not develop where the plant is in shade and it is absent from permanently waterlogged ground. Meadowsweet and water mint were held in high regard by the Druids and later by the "fairy doctors" who existed in rural Ireland until recently. These days you can buy packages of meadowsweet tea in some Irish shops.

Anatoly Kudryavitsky




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Worldwide use


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Things found on the way


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HAIKU

damp meadowsweet –
horses in mist
up to their oxters

Kate Newmann

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Related words

***** EUROPA Saijiki

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