Scandix pecten-veneris
| Scandix pecten-veneris | |
|---|---|
| |
| fruits and flowers | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | |
| (unranked): | |
| (unranked): | |
| (unranked): | |
| Order: | |
| Family: | |
| Genus: | |
| Species: | S. pecten-veneris
|
| Binomial name | |
| Scandix pecten-veneris | |
Scandix pecten-veneris (shepherd's-needle, Venus' comb, Venus's needle) is a species of edible plant belonging to the parsley family. It is native to Eurasia and it is known widely elsewhere as an introduced species and sometimes a weed. It is named for its long fruit, which has a thickened body up to 1.5 centimeters long and a beak which can measure up to 7 centimeters long and is lined with comblike bristles.
Linnaean Binomial
'Scandix' is in origin a Latin word for chervil used by Pliny the Elder, while 'pecten-veneris' signifies 'Venus's comb'.
English Names
When the long, erect fruits develop among the legs of the wheat, Shepherd's Needle looks so peculiar that a farm population could not help noticing it and naming it.[1]
Scandix pecten-veneris has a wealth of evocative common names in English - most of them needle-related, in reference to the distinctive fruit, which, when mature, make it unlikely to be confused with any other native umbellifer. The English folk imagination has made of the plant the 'needle' of the following : Adam, the beggar, the clock, the crow, the Devil, the Old wife/Old woman/Witch, Puck, the shepherd, and (more prosaically) the tailor. Of these, the tailor is (self-evidently) the plyer of the needle in his work; Adam, the beggar, the crow and the shepherd convey rustic simplicity; the clock draws a parallel with clock hands and 'needles', and the Devil, the Witch and Puck play on the idea of the (malignly) supernatural and uncanny.
Distribution
S. pecten-veneris has a range extending from Western, Central and Southern Europe Eastwards to Western and Central Asia and is also found in the Maghreb. Within the U.K the plant used to be widely distributed as a weed of arable land in the Southeast of England, being found as far West as Wiltshire, but became rather rare in its former haunts, a state of affairs attributed to stubble-burning and the use of modern herbicides[2][3] This gloomy tale of decline was, however, qualified in 1996 by wild food enthusiast Richard Mabey, who noted that, although the plant had suffered a dramatic decline in England, beginning in the 1950s, it began to recover with the banning of stubble-burning in the early 1990s. Furthermore - and contrary to earlier theories - the plant has proved to be resistant to modern herbicides after all and Mabey notes that the 'needles' of the plant are not readily separated from wheat by modern harvesting machinery - another factor contributing to its return to the English countryside.[4]
Habitat
S. pecten-veneris is a ruderal species, tending to favour dry, calcareous soils and often occurring as a weed of arable land and waste places near the sea, although it was formerly cultivated as a vegetable, as well as being gathered from the wild (see below).
Edible Plant
Scandix pecten-veneris has a long history of use in Europe, both as a leaf vegetable and as a salad vegetable. Some of the earliest references to its consumption are to be found in Ancient Greek texts satirising the tragedian Euripides (c.480-c.406 B.C.), of Salamis Island, which portray the playwright's mother, Cleito, as a humble greengrocer, [5] amongst whose wares was the popular vegetable scanthrix - the name of which found its way into Latin, in the modified form scandix, as a name for chervil (a related, edible umbellifer). The edible plant scanthrix is mentioned also by the Ancient Greek writers Opion, Theophrastus, and Erasistratus of Ceos, while the variant form of the name scanthrox is used by Pedanius Dioscorides for the same plant. Among Latin authors, Pliny the Elder lists Scandix among the edible plants of Egypt. Much later, the Vicentine physician Onorio Belli (a.k.a. Honorius Bellus, 1550-1604) notes that, in his day, it was eaten on the island of Crete[6]
References
- ^ Grigson,Geoffrey, The Englishman's Flora, pub. Readers Union Phoenix House Ltd. London 1958
- ^ Umbellifers of the British Isles Tutin T.G. BSBI Handbook No.2. Pub. Botanical Society of the British Isles,1980.
- ^ Streeter, David The Wildflowers of the British Isles illustrated by Garrard, Ian, pub. Midsummer Books Ltd. 1983.
- ^ Flora Britannica, Mabey, Richard, pub. Sinclair-Stevenson 1996
- ^ Justina Gregory, 'Euripidean Tragedy', in A Companion to Greek Tragedy, Justina Gregory (ed.), Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2005), page 252
- ^ Sturtevant, E.L. Sturtevant's Notes on Edible Plants, pub. J.P. Lyon Company Albany 1919 for State of New York Dept of Agriculture, reissued ed. U.P Hedrick as Sturtevant's Edible Plants by Dover Publications, inc. New York 1972.
External links
 | This Apiaceae article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |