| A Load of Old Rhubarb
Now that the raspberry season is in full fling and the rhubarb, which grows in front of the canes, is getting trampled underfoot in my desperate attempts to keep up with picking fruit before the blackbird gets the lion’s share, I think it’s time to consider this useful and versatile herb.
The rhubarb we pick as the first fruit (vegetable really of course) of spring, blanched or unblanched, is Rheum rhabarbarum a.k.a. R. rhaponticum, a 17th century import from Siberia. It was valued as a laxative, and most people are familiar with the digestive perils of gorging too heavily on rhubarb crumble! Most gardeners also know that the leaves and roots are poisonous, which is why garden rhubarb has never been used as a medicinal herb. The leaves contain oxalic acid, in concentrations which grow as the season progresses, eventually making it inadvisable to eat the stems - although this is as much because they become tough and we get fed up with it! Because it seems a waste to let it all go to seed, remember that rhubarb makes lovely jam, chutney, and a delicious country wine - if you remember to rack it off in good time and it doesn’t insist on turning every scrap of sweetness to alcohol!
Their very toxicity makes rhubarb leaves a handy aid for the organic gardener - boil them with some soft soap and use the water to spray plants afflicted with aphids, the soap making the liquid stick to the sucking pests’ bodies. Rhubarb chunks planted with cabbages are also said to keep both clubroot and root flies away.
We are more likely to grow Rheum palmatum, the Chinese Rhubarb, as an imposing ornamental. There are fabulous varieties with red or purple, translucent leaves, and others with enormous, sharply divided foliage. The massive flower heads are equally impressive. In Tibet and China, the roots have been collected for over 2000 years and made into treatments for gastric disorders and other ailments. Unlike garden rhubarb, the stems are round and not eaten. Chinese Rhubarb was introduced to Britain as a major medicinal herb in the 18th century, although it may have been cultivated much earlier in ancient Greece. In Victorian times, Chinese Rhubarb was supplemented by another medicinal species, Rheum officinale, also (confusingly) native to Tibet and western China.
The enormity of the leaves make all rhubarbs of benefit to wildlife, by keeping the soil cool and moist and a suitable habitat for amphibians and other creatures, and by providing cover. They suppress weeds well, apart from bindweed, which hides and grows under the leaves like a malicious toad and then swarms up the flower stems when you are looking the other way!
By the way, so-called Monk’s Rhubarb isn’t - it is a species of dock!
© Margaret Lear
www.plantswithpurpose.co.uk
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