One of the most spectacular, for me almost magical, wildlife gardening plants I’ve discovered in my project to create a wildlife-friendly garden is Purple Loosestrife.
These butterfly photos, probably my last of 2019, a quickly grabbed series of a Small Copper butterfly, Lycaena phlaeas, frantically nectaring on swaying Purple Loosestrife flowers by my wildlife pond on a sunny but rather blustery mid-September’s day, illustrate perfectly why it is such a wonderful wildlife-friendly plant to grow.
Gardening Value
Purple Loosestrife, or Lythrum salicaria to give it its botanical name, is a native perennial, widespread across the UK. In the wild it inhabits a range of damp habitats including river edges, marshes and pond margins. The wildflower works well in gardens because its height and colour have a strong impact, making it visually impressive in the way that relatively few other native wildlfowers are.
Its almost exotic-looking flowers are formed of tall rosettes of rich magenta-pink petals and it enjoys a long flowering period from June until well into September. Salicaria refers to the willow-like, elongated oval shape of its leaves and its red-hued stems can be striking in their own right, adding height and structure to a pond margin. Purple Loosestrife is easy to grow, being a vigourous plant which can grow up to a metre and a half tall, often in quite dense colonies and tolerates a wide variety of soil types. It establishes easily, so much so that in North America it has become designated an invasive species, and has a reputation and status similar to that of Himmalayan Balsam here.
Wildlife value
Purple Loosestrife is a particularly useful nectar source for a variety of long-tongued insects; not just butterflies and bees, but also hoverflies and moths, including several hawk-moth species. Its prolonged midsummer-into-autumn flowering period means Purple Loosestrife can serve pollinators as a nectar source both through the “June Gap” as well as supporting later emerging and second brood insects, such as Small Copper butterflies well into early autumn when many other nectar sources such as meadow flowers have vanished with the haycut and harvest.
Being a UK native wildflower, it is also favoured as a caterpillar host plant by several moth species including the Elephant Hawk-moth, Willowherb Hawk-moth and the Powdered Quaker.
Plant folklore
Local Folklore Names for Purple Loosestrife
Lythrum comes from the Greek word for “gore”, likely referencing its vivid flower hue and dye. John Gerard in in famous Herball general of 1597 classed it as a Willow-herb and named it Spiked Willow-herbe. Here in Norfolk it was known as Soldiers, possibly alluding to its erect growing habit and red colouration being reminiscent of military uniforms.
Other alternative names for Purple Loosestrife include Blooming Sally, Bouquet Violet, Grass Polly, Long Purples, Mederick (in Dutch), Purple Willowherb, Purple Lythrum, Red Sally, Salicaria, Salicaire (its French name), Spiked Willowstrife, Stray by the Lough (Ireland) Swaggering Sally.
Traditional Herbal and Medicinal Usage
In his 1597 text, John Gerard attributed strong astringent and blood-stopping properties to purple loosestrife. He documented its primary historical uses as controlling internal and external bleeding, managing diarrhea and dysentery, and cleansing skin ulcers. Additionally, the plant was prepared as a wash to treat inflamed eyes and as a gargle for throat swelling.
Its main common name suggests one of its many herbal uses may have been to “loose strife” and Gerard also recorded the classical folklore associated with the herb, noting the traditional belief that it calmed oxen if placed in their yoke.
“Lysimachia … tooke his name of a speciall vertue that it hath in appealing the strife and unruliness which falleth out among oxen at the plough, if it be put about their yokes”
Other Traditional Uses
A red dye and food colouring used to be made from its vividly coloured flowers and historically its tannins have been used to preserve ropes or wood from rotting in water.
Purple Loosestrife in Art and Literature
Purple loosestrife famously features in Sir John Everett Millais’s pre-Raphaelite masterpiece Ophelia, which depicts the tragic drowning of the character from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which highlights a shift in its folk name resulting from the marginal riverside habitat.
In Hamlet, Queen Gertrude recounts Opheluas death, saying that she had made garlands out of wildflowers including “long purples”.
There with fantastic garlands did she make
– Hamlet, Act IV Scene VII
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead-men’s-fingers call them
However due to a further clue in the following stanza, literary historians now believe Shakespeare was probably actually referring to the Early Purple Orchid (Orchis mascula), which grows in dry to damp woodland.
In 1851, when Millais painted his detailed botanical landscape along the Hogsmill River in Surrey, he didn’t find spring-blooming orchids. Instead, he painted tall, magenta spikes of purple loosestrife into the upper right-hand corner of the painting to symbolise Ophelia’s “long purples”.
The common name had in fact already shifted decades earlier, certainly by the Georgian era as by 1821, “Peasant Poet” John Clare, renowned for his intense, accurate celebrations of the English countryside, was already mentioning Purple Loosestrife under the folk name “Long Purples” in his works.
For example in his poem The Wildflower Nosegay, he writes:
“Where on the water op’d the lily buds
And fine long purples shadow’d in the lake…”
Purple Loosestrife and Charles Darwin
Purple loosestrife lastly played a significant role in the history of science writing.
Charles Darwin was deeply obsessed with the plant and featured it heavily in his botanical literature, particularly his 1877 book “The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species”.
Darwin spent years meticulously counting the reproductive organs of purple loosestrife because it exhibits a rare trait called trimorphic heterostyly in which flowers possess three different lengths of styles and stamens to ensure cross-pollination.
