Sticky Buds

My childhood will look very little like the childhood my children have. I spent most of the summer holidays wandering around with a pack of other feral youngsters, roaming a specified radius but essentially unsupervised and returning only to be fed or when darkness fell, whichever came sooner.

Children’s TV was broadcast for only an hour or so a day. If you had said “handheld games console” we would have pictured something along the lines of Frogger, powered by 8 non-rechargeable D-batteries or an AC adapter with about 3 inches of cable.

Yes, kids today blah blah blah. Ain’t it awful?

But one thing has not changed, and that is the delight and horror children can extract from the mundane flora of the United Kingdom.

I have been introducing my boys (Roger Jr and Tancred) to one of my favourite leisure plants, and nothing has made me more proud as a father than to see them getting as much enjoyment out of it as I ever did.

I speak, of course, of the sticky bud – Galium aparine, also known (I discovered literally today) as goosegrass.

What a plant! You can throw it at people – and it sticks to them!

An unpopular child's fate

Seriously, in the early 1980s in Suffolk this is what passed for fun: chasing one another around wood and scrubland wielding bundles of creeper. Losers would quickly be made to resemble a green man.

That was really its only application. It was passed down from generations of schoolboy lore than stored and dried for long enough, sticky buds would turn into the legendary stinkweed – however, no one I knew ever achieved the alchemical Great Work.

Yes, I have introduced my children to sticky buds and now happily feel the lash of barbed plant matter on the back of my neck every time we take the dogs for a walk, and merrily pick burs off washed clothing with a wry smile upon my face.

I do, however, think it is important to teach my offspring about right and wrong. And so, having shown them all that is good in the vegetable kingdom, I have also warned them about the natural enemy of the toddler – the nettle.

I remember nettle stings hurting a lot more when I was a young ‘un. Judging from Roger Jr and Tancred’s reaction to even the most evanescent contact with them, this is down to my advancing enleatherment rather than nettles having become less malicious.

Plant morality in action

In the woods near my house, the age old battle between good and evil is being fought out once again. A stand of nettles, towering a good five feet high, has been flattened – not by vengeful stick-wielding infants – but by sticky buds, creeping and climbing all over it. 

Much like the Nazi war machine in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, the nettles crumpled back to the ground, with only a few isolated pockets of resistance holding out.

But what’s this? A plant not of my childhood has intervened and is pursuing its own, unknown agenda. Bindweed.  Nettles may be evil, but there is at least a straightforwardness and a nobility in their evil. The old certainties are being pushed aside, as bindweed spreads its insidious tentacles around the grappling combatants.

A metaphor

Where did it come from? What does it want? We simply don’t know – it’s alien, it frightens us. It doesn't sting but you can't chuck a load of it on someone's back either without them realising either. And it keeps on coming. 

And that is how the place where I take my dogs to the toilet provides a metaphor for the times we live in today.