aconitum napellus

Encountering yet another highly toxic flower in the woods (previously), this example monk’s hood or wolfsbane (Blauer Eisenhut, I think this sort of buttercup is specifically the subspecies Aconitum tauricum, named after Alpine Gaul) is also now cultivated as a garden plant for its complex, scalloped inflorescences and general hardiness returning year after year.

In ancient times, according to Avicenna and other sources, the sap of the plant was used to make poisoned-tipped arrows and spears, and has been used throughout the ages to the present day for dispatching enemies. Even handling the plant can led to organ failure and death—so despite the beauty of the blooms, I can’t understand the appeal of having it in one’s flowerbed (growing them outlawed from the early Middle Ages onward with transgressions subject to capital punishment), and who would have thought the deadliest things in the forest was the flora rather than the fauna.

zwischenstopp: mellrichstadt

While we’ve mentioned the next bigger town numerous times especially in connection with the dying out of the Henneberg line and Count Poppo and go there regularly (see previously here, here and here), we realised that we’ve not dedicated much writing to the place itself, elevated to the status of a city within the Grand Duchy of Würzburg in the thirteenth century and its importance as a seat of learning with a Latin school in medieval times before desecularisation and joining the Kingdom of Bavaria. 

cap and gloves

A couple of weeks ago, I passed a few fine exemplars of Martagon lilies, which we’ve learned about before, whilst walking through the woods, and slowly as the weather waxes warmer and the ground soaks up all the spring rains, here’s hoping we stay we’ll irrigated to help the forest recover from some punishingly dry years, the lilies are being replaced by another pink perennial, the common foxglove (Digitalis purpurea). Called Fingerhüte (finger hat or thimble) in German, the flower was named by our botanist friend Leohart Fuchs (see previously) building off the Latin designation with rather fearsome etymological battle surround the above Anglo-Saxon name, arguments back and forth on whether it's a perversion of some other name regarding its toxicity or supposed pharmacological merits since people couldn’t possibly believe that foxes wore such flowers a stockings to muffle their movements whilst hunting—could they? Stemming from folk medicine and herbalist, a compound isolated from the foxglove is used in cardiac therapies but is highly deadly for humans and other animals (like the lily up top) if touched or ingested.

zwischestopp: oberwaldbehrungen

After an running some errands on an overcast day, I decided to take a quick detour and make the time to stop and investigate a village that I often pass but always seemed too rushed or liminally close to visit, just a few kilometres away dominated by a church on a hill above a jumble of Fachwerk houses. 

Among the oldest settlements in the Besengau landscape of the northern reaches of the Rhön (the placename referring to the practise of crafting brooms, Besen, out of birch twigs which outside of harvest season was the area’s primary economy activity) Oberwaldbehrungen has its first document in 795, I learned it was formerly the last village in this region to have no street names (see also). 

Once under the auspices of the bishopric of Würzburg, it was given as a fiefdom to the lords of Tann, an exclave, in 1480—joining neighbouring Urspringen in 1670 as part of the Henneberg holdings, finally being restored to the Kingdom of Bavaria under the provisions of the Congress of Vienna in 1814. I took the long way up to the Dorfkirche on the hill but discovered a quite nice path—despite the weather—through the woods leading back down to the village.

centaurea nervosa

Though no peonies or poppies (though our late-bloomers might be inspired by these) in the garden just yet, we’ve got quite a nice spread of these thistle-like plants that sprout at the edge of the deck in late spring. Called less charitably knapweed, Flockenblumen or bluets are commonly known as centaury in deference to the centaur Chiron who taught medicinal use of plants to human though Achilles, Aeneas, Asclepius and other Greek heroes. Ranging widely in colour from yellow to purple, the ornamental plant native to the Alps is the source of the colour cornflower blue and is useful alongside agricultural crops as a more appetising food source for insects. The bumblebees and other pollinators absolutely adore them and we are pretty partial to them as well. 

 

sunday drive: wasserschloss roßrieth and walldorfer-kirchenburg

For what was the first time in a long time, H and I took advantage of the fine and sunny weather and visited a few sights from outdoors on either side of Mellrichtstadt and Meiningen first with the moated castle located within a small farming village of the same name. Existing as the seat of a lordship since the twelfth century before being destroyed for harbouring highwaymen in 1401, the rebuilt sixteenth century compound was in the ownership of the rulers of Ost- and Nordheim until the mediatisation of imperial immediacy at the beginning of the nineteenth century (die Reichsdeputationhauptschluss von 1803) when transferred to the Free State of Bavaria. 

The castle is in private hands and cannot be visited by the surround grounds and agricultural outbuildings were nice to explore. Next we came to the fortified church (see links above) of the town of Walldorf, now a suburb of Meiningen. Originally a medieval defensive Höhenberg (a hill castle) along the old trade route from Frankfurt to Erfurt—a good vantage point to monitor for smugglers and other potential disruptions, the complex on the promontory has been an episcopal fort since 1008 when the archbishopric of Würzburg took over the area. 

The high keep with residential structures and a garden was used as a protected farmyard through the ages as it is today, restored after reunification and a fire in 2012 that caused extensive damage. Beyond its historical value as a monument, designs for restoration undertaken and achieved have made it moreover a “biotope church” with a replacement roof optimised for nesting kestrels, a colony of jackdaws (Dohlen), bats, bees that visit the old cottage gardens plus a nesting stork with a young brood.

bombylildæ

While in Europe we don’t have humming birds (Kolibris), we are lucky enough to have these uncanny important pollinators called the fly bee or the humblefly (Wollschweber). Our garden is absolutely full of them but I’ve never managed to capture a picture of one until now when I spied one resting on a flower (see also), which by the end of the season can grow quite substantially and present like their avian cousins but less so than the equally camera-shy Hummingbird Hawk-Moth (Taubenschwänzchen) that hovers and has a proboscis for nectaring. We’re visited by them too and maybe if I’m patient, I’ll be able to get a photo.

a baneful herb

In a quite round-about way, I learned the identity of these plants that appear in the woods in early spring: hellebore (Nieswurz) also called Lenten roses due to the timing is a type of buttercup that is mildly toxic and eschewed by most, distasteful and deadly in sufficient quantities and dangerous to touch. Sometimes recommended as a purgative in traditional medicine, the plant can also cause a host of horrible things including the birth-defect of cyclopia, characterised by the failure to properly divide the eyes into two orbits, tinnitus, vertigo and slowing heart rate, and though commended in Greek mythology as a curative for madness and possession including releasing the princesses of Argos from the spell of the Maenads and the inducements of Dionysus modern witchcraft does not endorse its use beyond the wild and ornamental.

dewdrop

Last year it was a little too warm for snowdrops (Galanthus, Schneeglöckchen) but this spring we had quite a profusion including a few fine examples of the related but rarer leucojum (below center, from the Greek for white violet, Knotenblumen for the green or yellow knotted tips to their outer petals).

Both snowflakes as all related genera are known are part of the Amaryllis family of bulbous perennials and are also sometimes called Saint Agnes’ flower, as they usually begin to appear around the feast day of Agnes of Bohemia on 2 March, springing up in shadier, wetter spots and tend to be pretty hardy and resilient garden plants despite their seemingly delicate and ephemeral nature.  Summer snowflakes also grow in late spring.

hügel und tal

Taking a rather long, meandering afternoon walk now that Spring has arrived, I headed towards the former border and thought to follow the patrol road, the Kolonnenweg to its terminus understanding that there was a large tri-colour marker to be found there. I think I took a wrong turn or failed to go on long enough but came to a rise below the Hohe Schuhe and hill top clearing that provided a good view of Hermannsfeld and the border tower now a monument beyond. 

Believing I knew a way to return home without backtracking, I followed a logging trail around the mountain and down into a valley of pastures, which I though was familiar at first but then realised I had gone considerably further out of the way than I had intended and ended up in the fields north of Eußenhausen where the former control point and crossing to Meiningen is conserved as a monument.

Trying to get my bearings and finding a cycle path to follow, I discovered the ruins of a church belfry belonging to a settlement called Elmbach or Ellenbach—vacated along with surrounding property during the era of divided Germany as it was too close to the border (see previously), the ruin a reminder of a sixteenth century desertion but yet a poignant symbol, lonely in the fields whatever the circumstance. The tower houses a chapel and since 1989 has been re-consecrated as a symbol of reunion. 

 

 

schneebedeckt

Just a few local impressions from my walks yesterday and the day before.  We’ve gotten quite a bit of snow.

 

tycho magnetic anomaly

The recent buzz about the discovery of a mysterious yet most likely of mundane origins of a metal monolith in the desert of Utah that channels in a sense the cinematic titan of 2001 made me think about this smaller though also puzzling concrete post I encountered during a walk in the woods last week. 

It’s in a clearing where some trees were recently felled for lumber. Though just off a logging trail, there’s nothing else nearby and no other signs of construction. The blue bit embedded seems to be the pontil marked base of a cobalt glass bottle. I wonder what it could be for or why it was placed there—I’ll have to keep an eye on this one. 

 

i’ll take the high road and you’ll take the low road

Though never looking forward to my long workweek commute—which is less frequent in these times and am able to telework (oder Home Office) most days one big consolation is a stretch of road I take over the mountains from outside of Bischofsheim to Fladungen along state road 2288, the Hochrhönstraße, crossing the highlands and connecting two regions as well as a conduit to manage traffic through the UNESCO-recognised nature reserve. Opened to vehicular traffic with fanfare on this day in 1958—construction began in the early 1930s but delayed during the war and only much later was the gravel path asphalted, this twenty-five kilometre scenic route could well be the highlight of any journey but it is especially nice to see just before coming home.

pilzfund

H and I wandered a bit in the woods foraging for mushrooms, and while we didn’t really encounter anything that we were reasonably certain was edible and warranted collecting and later research, we found that the forest was ripening with all sorts of fungi, including Wood’s Ear (Auricularia auricula-judae—see previously and which we forgot again was safe for consumption and is widely used in China—I just don’t know about the texture and the prospect of picking one up) that was pretty widespread along the path and some more nice examples of fly agaric (Amanita muscaria, Fliegenpilz, see above). 

A new variety that we had not encountered beforehand, however, were these colourful ones in the same family—sometimes referred to “verdigris agaric” called blue roundhead (Stropharia caerulea, der Grünblaue Träuschling)—the specific epithet caerulea being Latin for blue while for contemporary speakers it generally indicates a shade between azure and teal. Host trees are usually beeches (Buchen) and thrive in alkaline soils.

ibīdem

From the same source as our previous post, we are really enjoying exploring this extensive, exhaustive collection of historic maps and surveys and finding our little pocket of the world through the ages. Easy and intuitive, see if you can find yourself in this cartographic collection and how much things have changed and/or remained the same. Here we are annotated on two different catalogues of the Henneberger holdings in the seventeenth century.

 

to live alone in the bee-loud glade

Via Kottke, these superlative entries in the macro category for International Garden Photographer of the Year commended us to one recent snapshot that brought to mind William Butler Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree. What pictures from your garden are you keen to share? Explore an expansive gallery of many more superb and patient, intimate snapshots at the links up top. 

lilium martagon

Our thanks to friend of the blog Nag on the Lake for helping to identify a flower that I’ve encountered quite often in mid-June over a window of a few weeks during my walks in the woods. I had tried to research and learn what they were but having heard of an elusive and exotic local variety of orchid, I had pursued the wrong line of investigation.
The martagon lily (Türkenbund-Lilie, the epithet referring to the characteristic reflexed petals also derives from the word for a type of turban) has a range across Eurasia and is popular as a garden plant as well due to its long life span of fifty years and more. It was believed to have curative properties by practitioners of traditional medicine but is highly toxic to cats.