Teasel
A warm humid morning in late July. The village beyond us is humming with summer activity already and the sun is hot on my face. It’s been raining for a few days now, enough to give all the plants in our garden a boost of growth but one plant towers spectacularly amongst the others. The tall other-worldly sturdy green stem of a teasel emerges from the border beneath the wild rose, topped with around twenty striking flower heads. There were a few plants when we moved into our house about seven years ago but, when I cleared the bed, it disappeared for a few years. This year it’s back with aplomb. A flurry of wings overhead. A small knot of sparrows breach the fence and settle in the bare twig branches of a box bush that perished in the late frosts this year.
The teasel stands like a master of modernist flower architecture catching the full morning sun, a vegetal skyscraper amidst rosy suburbs. The stem is strong and harsh, studded with needle-sharp thorns, and topped with a bold spiny flower-head, an elongated egg-shape. The heads have patches of lilac-coloured tiny flowers clustered around the girth of the teasel head and from a distance the plant looks like it is shedding skin. Slim pale green barbs cast out around the head in a regular pattern, each inner core diamond-shaped with the faintest blush of purple, a flower yet to be. Long, thin vivid green sepals frame the teasel head, like the elegant arms of a dancer framing an extravagant pose. The future life cycle of this magnificent plant, from bud to flower to seed, is all there, waiting to unravel in the coming months.
Plants shape human culture (see The Cultural History of Plants anthology recently published) and sometimes we can read the history of our landscape through the presence of plants today. Teasels have a strong folk history: the barbs of the Fuller’s Teasel were the perfect strength and composition to be essential tools in the textiles placed into a wooden frame or ‘teasel hand’ to brush the nap of the woollen cloth. Their appearance in our garden alludes to the long history of the wool trade in this area: the market town of Tavistock, five miles north of here, was a major player in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth- century cloth industry. It is likely that teasels picked from the surrounding land played their part in keeping the quality of the cloth high enough to place Devon as the most important contributor to English woollen exports to Europe.
This year, the teasel heads provide bees with countless tiny opportunities for gathering pollen until the late summer winds roll up the Tamar valley and dry the seeds, ready to be teased from their tiny grips by goldfinches. For now, the plant holds sway over the border, a wild resurgent from the past.