2023-11-26 21:00:23
I can see from the nasturtium that there has been night frost. Suddenly the round leaves and orange or red flowers look limp and extinguished. Hopefully the seeds don’t freeze. I collect a few every late summer, but thanks to climate change, seeds always survive in the outdoor soil. The following year they shoot up and around them. It’s enormous how quickly those plants can grow once they get going.
I find nasturtiums a pleasant wall and ground cover. The flowers are edible too; they taste slightly sharp, like radish. The leaves are also edible, raw in the lettuce, and the seeds that I help overwinter I could also put in a preserving bath, like capers. But I’m not particularly crazy about capers.
Nasturtium is an exotic species. That is to say: the plant was once brought to Europe for aesthetic reasons. The original habitat of the wild nasturtium is neither in the East Indies nor in the West. The Andes is the cradle; Peru, Bolivia and Chile to be precise. Now it’s not a cherry either, so there’s nothing wrong with that name at all.
Yellow corridors
Nasturtium attracts aphids and cabbage white caterpillars. They can lure those creatures away from the vegetable garden. They are sometimes also eaten by caterpillars, such as the leaf miners that have dug yellow tunnels in the leaves in the photo.
I read on Wikipedia that the plant has only been known in Europe since 1845. That year, botanist William Lobb brought it from Chile and presented it to Queen Victoria. At that time it was common to bring plant and animal species from the tropics to the homeland, just as species were brought to colonies. Nasturtiums could become naturalized as warming continues, but so far they are limited to gardens. Where it is a nice frost detector.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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