Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum

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Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum

Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, in our back garden.

Those of us lucky enough to have gardens have been enjoying the recent spring sunshine, which is compensation for the current restrictions in our lives.

Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, is another of my favourite plants. My Dad grew it in our gardens in the West Midlands and North-east Scotland when I was a child, alongside Forsythia,  giving a beautiful spring splash of colour (the reddish pink of Flowering Currant contrasting with the bright yellow of Forsythia). Both plants were extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but the became less fashionable, which is a shame. For me they give a blast of pure nostalgia.

The first Flowering Currant I grew was Ribes sanguineum King Edward VII’, planted when I was about ten years old, and I now grow Ribes sanguineum ‘Pulborough Scarlet’ in our back garden in Norwich. I have also encountered the plant many times on my travels, in gardens and in the countryside. The distribution map in the Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora shows naturalised Ribes sanguineum growing widely across the British Isles. Habitats include woods, verges, hedges and waste ground. It grows beside the railway line from Norwich to Sheringham, by the edges of a cutting just south of Roughton Road station. (Sadly, I’ll miss it there this spring.)

Ribes sanguineum is a native of the western United States (California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington states) and Canada (British Columbia) [Note 1]. It is a member of family Grossulariaceae, the Currant family, which contains just one genus, Ribes, of which there are about 150 species, which grow in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, is a close relative of Blackcurrants (Ribes nigrum) and Redcurrants (Ribes rubrum) and Gooseberries (Rumex uva-crispa) [Note 2]. Ribes sanguineum has a delicious “curranty” smell, rather like Blackcurrant, when you touch its foliage or sometimes just in warm sunshine.

Other English names for Flowering Currant include Redflower Currant, Blood Currant, Pink-flowered Currant, Red Flowering Currant. “Blood Currant” is a translation from the scientific name: Ribes means “currant” and sanguineum means “bloody” (as in Bloody Crane’s-bill, Geranium sanguineum, which I wrote about in 2018).

Ribes sanguineum is an easy shrub to grow in a garden and will grow in full sun or partial shade. In our last garden I grew it up the north side of a fence, so the base was in dense shade, but the top of the plant reached up into the sunlight. In our present garden it grows in a border in sandy loam in a west-facing bed, where it has sun in the morning but is in shade by mid afternoon.

Flowering Currant takes the form of a deciduous shrub up to 2.5 metres (8 feet) tall. It can grow that wide too, but I have trained mine to grow as an upright column. It’s an easy shrub to prune and I have seen it grown as a hedge (‘Pulborough Scarlet’ is especially good for this). You can even train it up a wall or fence. If you need to trim it, do so just after flowering. It is hardy (to -15 or even -20 degrees Celsius) and flowers very reliably, from as early as March until mid April or, in colder areas, May.

The commonest garden cultivars are ‘Pulborough Scarlet’ (deep crimson flowers with white centres) and ‘King Edward VII’ (pendulous dark crimson flowers), both of which are very good. Other forms include ‘Red Bross’ (scarlet buds, opening to reddish-pink flowers), ‘Koja’ (pinky-red flowers) and ‘Porky’s Pink’ (described as having candyfloss-pink blooms). For something a bit different, there are white-flowered forms, such as ‘White Icicle‘ [Note 3]. Form ‘Brocklebankii’ has yellow-green foliage, if you like that sort of thing.

Other Ribes are worth growing, but are not commonly found in garden centres. They include Ribes laurifolium (evergreen, with greeny-white flowers in late winter), Ribes speciosum (dangling flowers almost like a Fuchsia) and Ribes odoratum (yellow, clove-scented flowers).

In my own experience, Flowering Currant doesn’t seem to be affected by pests, though the RHS list aphids, leaf spot, powdery mildews, honey fungus and coral spot as possible problems. (it is very susceptible to Honey fungus, apparently.) In the United States, species of Ribes can act as an alternatve host to White Pine Blister Rust, Cronartium ribicola, a fungus accidentally introduced from China in 1900 [Note 4].

Ribes sanguineum is good wildlife plant and provides a very important source of  nectar and pollen for newly-emerged queen bumblebees and also the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes). This is another good reason to grow it in your garden.

Tree Bumblebee, Bombus hypnorum

Tree Bumblebee, Bombus hypnorum, queen on Flowering Currant

Male Anthophora plumipes

Male Hairy-footed Flower Bee, Anthophora plumipes

Female Anthophora plumipes 

Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, queen

Later in the year Flowering Currant has strings of berries, rather like its Redcurrant and Blackcurrant relatives. These are edible but not enjoyable. The Plants for a Future website damns them with faint praise: “not … a wonderful flavour, but … tolerable raw”. Apparently, they “can be harvested when still firm in August and when stored carefully will keep until November, by which time the flavour has improved slightly”.

I leave the berries on mine for the birds. Blackbirds’ appetite for the berries is probably one reason why the plant now occurs widely in the countryside.

Notes

Note 1 – In the wild, there are two distinct forms of Ribes sanguineum: var. sanguineum and var. glutinosum. The differences are listed on the Flora of North America website as:

  • Racemes 5-15(-20)-flowered, erect to stiffly spreading or ascending; sepals red – var. sanguineum.
  • Racemes 15-40-flowered, pendent; sepals pink to white – var. glutinosum.

The plant was first described by Archibald Menzies in 1793, and was introduced into Britain in the early 19th Century (1826, according to the Online Atlas, or 1817, according to Paghat). They were known from the wild by 1916.

Note 2 – Stace (New Flora of the British Isles, Fourth Edition, 2019) lists eight species of Ribes growing wild in the British Isles.

  1. Ribes rubrum (Redcurrant) – probably native but also found as a garden escape.
  2. Ribes spicatum (Downy Currant) – native and local in woods on limestone from Lancashire and Yorkshire north to Caithness.
  3. Ribes nigrum (Blackcurrant) – Neophyte / naturalised.
  4. Ribes sanguineum (Flowering Currant) – Neophyte / naturalised.
  5. Ribes odoratum (Buffalo Currant) – Neophyte / naturalised survivor.
  6. Ribes alpinum (Mountain Currant) – Native in limestone woods in Northern England; escape elsewhere
  7. Ribes uva-crispa (Gooseberry) – Neophyte / naturalised.
  8. Ribes divaricatum (Coast Gooseberry) – Neophyte / naturalised survivor.

I have seen 1, 3, 4 and 7 growing in the wild.

Note 3 – Much of my information on different Ribes cultivars and species in the garden comes from the article “Currant Affairs” by Louise Curley, in the March 2017 edition of “The English Garden“.

(I keep a stash of these magazines in the summerhouse at the bottom of our garden for browsing from time to time with a cup of tea. My wife Vanna refers to them as my “garden porn”.)

Note 4 – See the American Phytopathological Society website for more details.

Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis

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Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis

Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis

The Barren Strawberry, Potentilla sterilis, is one of the first flowers of spring and can be in flower as early as February, especially in a mild winter like this one, though in cooler areas it will flower into May. The nearest plants are in my local cemetery, where it grows in the rougher grassy areas beneath trees. This is its usual habitat, though it will grow out in the open in upland areas. The plant can also be found on walls and in rock crevices.

Like Wild Strawberry (Fragaria vesca), which I wrote about last June, Barren Strawberry is a low-growing perennial and a member of the Rosaceae (the Rose family). Both plants have attractive white flowers.

Although the plants are superficially similar, there are a number of differences between Wild and Barren Strawberries.

Wild Strawberry flowers later in the year than Barren Strawberry (April to July, rather than February to May). Barren Strawberry has more widely spaced petals than Wild Strawberry and these are notched, and the sharply pointed green sepals extend at least as far as, or further than, the petal tips. Wild Strawberry has bright green, shiny leaves but those of Barren Strawberry are dull, grey-green with spreading hairs and smaller, with less prominent veins. Each Wild Strawberry leaflet tapers to a point but the terminal tooth on each Barren Strawberry leaflet is shorter than those on either side, giving it a more rounded appearance.

The ‘barren’ in Barren Strawberry and the plant’s specific name, sterilis, give a key difference from the Wild Strawberry: its fruits are not edible so there is no point in waiting for any red strawberries to form.

The fruit in both Barren and Wild Strawberries is an achene, a dry fruit which contains the seed. But in the Wild Strawberry the receptacle swells to produce an edible accessory fruit, the strawberry that we know and love. In Barren Strawberry the receptacle doesn’t swell and we are left with a small, dry and hard fruit, to the disappointment of foragers.

Potentilla sterilis is widely distributed in the British Isles. It is native here and throughout  much of the rest of Europe (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, , Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland). It is also listed as “doubtfully present” in the North Caucasus and former Yugoslavia. Barren Strawberry has been introduced into Newfoundland in North America, where it is known as the Strawberryleaf Cinquefoil.

Clive Stace lists 16 species of Cinquefoils (Potentilla) in his “New Flora of the British Isles” (Fourth Edition 2019). Potentilla means “powerful, despite its small size” or “little powerful one” and is derived from the Latin word potens and French potence, which both mean “strong”, “powerful”, “mighty”, or “potent”. This is a reference to the claimed medicinal value of some plants in this genus.

British relatives of Barren Strawberry include Silverweed (Potentilla anserina; edible root and young leaves, astringent), Tormentil (Potentilla erecta;  astringent, folk medicine for diarrhoea) and Creeping Cinquefoil (Potentilla reptans; edible young leaves, antispasmodic and astringent). These three plants have yellow petals but others, such as Rock Cinquefoil, Potentilla rupestris, have white petals. The Shrubby Cinquefoil, formerly Potentilla fruticosa, widely grown as a garden shrub and found growing wild the British Isles in a Cumbria and Upper Teesdale in Northern England and in parts of Western Ireland, has been reclassified as Dasiphora fruticosa. The wild form has yellow petals but garden cultivars can also have white or orange flowers.

In grassland, Barren Strawberry becomes much more difficult to find once it has finished flowering, as the grass grows above the plant, making it more or less invisible. By late summer, the plant is but a distant memory, until spring arrives and the flowers open once more.

Small-flowered Catchfly, Silene gallica

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Small-flowered Catchfly, Silene gallica

Small-flowered Catchfly, Silene gallica

The Eastern Daily Press headline read “Endangered wildflower once again blooming near North Walsham“. The wildflower was Small-flowered Catchfly, Silene gallica, and it was thriving on two of Norfolk’s former railway lines now used as footpaths: on Weaver’s Way at Felmingham (between Aylsham and North Walsham) and on the Paston Way at Knapton (just outside North Walsham, to the north-east).

The newspaper article appeared in July 2017 and we kept a copy to remind us to look for the plant, but it wasn’t until early June 2019 that we finally made the trip.

We took the train from Norwich to North Walsham and then walked 2.5 miles south-west along Weaver’s Way to Felmingham. It is a lovely walk and the Dog Roses and Elder bushes were in flower. We stopped frequently on the way there and back to look at insects. We eventually reached Felmingham and found the Small-flowered Catchfly growing in a sandy cutting just west of the station, just as advertised.

The white-flowered form of Silene gallica (shown above) is pretty enough, but the Felmingham railway cutting was also home to plants with pink flowers, and plants with white petals blotched with red. The latter form is exquisite and known as Silene gallica var. quinquevulneraria. It is easy to see why it is sometimes cultivated in gardens.

Silene gallica var. quinquevulneraria

Silene gallica var. quinquevulneraria

Silene gallica - pink flowered form

Silene gallica – pink flowered form

Silene gallica is in the Pink family, the Caryophyllaceae, and is a relative of Spanish Catchfly and Spring Sandwort, which I have already written about on this blog.

It is a lovely annual plant of disturbed, sandy ground, with sticky stems and leaves and campion-like flowers with five petals. In Britain it flowers from June to October, but from March to May in southern Europe. It grows up to 30cm (12 inches) tall. It is a native of Eurasia and North Africa but in Britain the plant is classified as an Archaeophyte (non-native plants that became established before 1500). According to Plantlife, Silene gallica var quinquevulneraria is only known as a casual of garden origin.

Small-flowered Catchfly needs disturbed ground to grow, and at Felmingham rabbits are providing plenty of this by burrowing into the sandy banks of the old cutting. Bramble clearance by the North Walsham Conservation Group, a local group of The Conservation Volunteers (TCV), has helped as well.

Elsewhere, the plant is mainly found in arable fields on sandy or gravelly soils, and on old walls and waste ground. It also grows in open, drought-prone coastal grassland on banks and cliffs, and in sand dunes in the Channel Islands. Seeds mainly germinate in autumn, but the seedlings cannot tolerate temperatures below -10 °C.

The plant was once widespread in the UK and has been recorded in 283 ten km squares as far north as central Scotland. However, it is in steep decline in Britain and has been given the status of “Red – Endangered & Critically Endangered”. It is covered by the Norfolk Biodiversity Action Plan and the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (referenced by Plantlife in its species dossier). The information sheet for Plantlife’s “Back From The Brink” project gives useful habitat management advice.

As so often, modern agricultural practices are the main reason for its decline. Field margins are often removed and the land is sprayed with herbicides and fertilisers. If herbicides don’t kill off the plants, fertilisers enrich the soil and allow coarser plants to outcompete the delicate catchfly. On the Welsh coast, tourist developments are also a threat.

Sliene gallica has now virtually disappeared from northern Europe, but it is widespread in central and southern Europe and occurs as a roadside weed throughout much of the temperate world.

Small-flowered catchfly, Silene gallica

Small-flowered Catchfly, Silene gallica var. quinquevulneraria, growing on a sandy bank.

Wikipedia lists two other English names for Small-flowered Catchfly – Common Catchfly and Windmill Pink.

The plant isn’t considered to be edible. The Plants For A Future website lists a couple of possible medicinal uses but you should look for cures elsewhere, given the plant’s rarity in Britain.