Wednesday 15 July 2020

St John's wort

Hail to thee blithe spirit
Bird thou never wert

I've included this couplet from Shelley's tribute To a Skylark to emphasise that 'wort' in any plant name is pronounced to rhyme with 'wert', 'hurt', 'Bert', and 'shirt' NOT 'court', 'short', 'snort' or 'WART' .

Think of 'worm', 'world', 'worth', 'worst', 'word', 'work' when you pronounce 'WORT'.
Remember that in English it is words beginning with 'wa' that are nearly always pronounced 'orr' not 'err': e.g. 'war', 'ward', 'wall', 'warm', 'water', 'Walter' and even 'was', 'wash', 'waffle', 'wasp', 'want' etc.

End of spelling and pronunciation rant.

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Anyway this is the Perforate St John's WORT, Hypericum perforatum.  
'Perforate' because if you hold the leaves up to the light you can see tiny translucent spots like perforations.  These flowers grow between posts 9 and 10 at Filnore Woods and in the grass below the overhead cables below the pylon.


My Reader's Digest Wildflower Guide says,"During the crusades, the Knights of St John of Jerusalem used this St John's Wort to heal the wounds of crusaders" because, according to the mediaeval doctrine of signatures, the holes in the leaves were like battle wounds.  No idea if it was effective.

Photo: Alan Watts
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Postscript - even Percy Bysshe wasn't that great at rhyming - 

Hail to thee blithe spirit
Bird thou never wert
That from Heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art

Photo of skylark: Mike Lane in the Guardian







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