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Glorious Mud?

Squelch, squelch, as I trudge down the garden to let the hens out. Squelch, squelch, goes an alarming semi-liquid layer under the black matting in the nursery. The combined effects of rain and snow melt over winter have turned the garden into a mud bath. The geese slide fitfully down the garden to find a patch of grass, then trample it to invisibility. Spades, optimistically inserted into neglected flower beds, stay obstinately put, requiring some effort to overcome the force of suction and retrieve them.

Who needs mud? I look for the good side of most garden disasters, but for a spell of January blues, I admit, I’m struggling. SOIL – now that’s something different. I could go on forever about the fascinating invertebrates and teeming microbes that inhabit the soil. But most depend on air spaces, and oxygen, to support them. Mud is SOIL minus AIR –not so exciting. Anyone who has pulled a dying plant from waterlogged ground and caught a whiff of the stink of water from which oxygen has vanished will know that.

Some large mammals need to wallow in mud. And, before you point out there aren’t many hippos in Scotland, we used to MAKE mud-wallows for our pigs, by playing the hose into a hollow. They would joyfully coat themselves, and be spared sunburn. Talking of skin care, don’t ladies pay huge sums to have mud plastered on them?

Mud in April is useful for house martins, too, as they return from Africa to build and repair their exquisite muddy dwellings under the eaves.  Remember, should April turn out to be dry and sunny, to make a muddy puddle for them! Many birds use mud as a building material – and so do some bees. But in February….?

Then I remember the mud flats and saltmarshes of Essex estuaries that I used to haunt over twenty years ago, swimming in the improbably murky shallows at high tide when the soft ooze squeezed deliciously between my toes, at low tide watching the grazing activities of thousands of Brent geese, and trying to distinguish the myriad wading birds that, plain, found sustenance in the GLORIOUS mud. We would venture on to the mudflats by circuitous paths known only to a few, and we would gather samphire. Not the Shakespearian kind that grows on cliffs, but Marsh Samphire, or Glasswort, Salicornia europea – a strange, bright green succulent plant that looks like phallic seaweed and tastes like heaven, stir-fried in butter. It’s a traditional Essex wildfood now become a delicacy, but no-one but us seemed to eat it then. It grows – only – on MUD.

Salicornia is a halophyte, a group of plants whose physiology allows them to tolerate being covered twice daily by salty water. Other useful muddy halophytes include the Sea Lavender, which has been bred to provide us with “everlasting flowers”, pretty Sea Aster, edible Sea Purslane, Scurvy Grass (you can guess its use!) and our other student staple, Sea Beet – a ready-salted ancestor of all the leaf beets, chards and beetroots.

On one occasion, prowling the sea wall snaking round a muddy creek of the Crouch, I saw a silver, feathery plant sprawling over the foot of the wall. I think I actually dropped to my knees. This was Sea Wormwood, Artemisia maritima, a rarely seen and beautiful native. It was the start of a lifelong addiction to the whole family of Artemisia.

I still miss my Essex mudflats. That’s why – even in January, especially in January, - I lurk about the Tay estuary at low tide at Port Allen or Newburgh, and the glories of mud (see above)!

© Margaret Lear, Bankfoot   

www.plantswithpurpose.co.uk