Making Friends With Robin Goodfellow

Forgotten Herbs Part One

Have you ever experienced that strange phenomenon, when a word you’ve never heard before, or something you hadn’t thought about for ages suddenly seems to pop up everywhere in your consciousness?

I learned this week, that this curiosity has a name - The "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon." It’s a well-documented frequency illusion familiar to policemen and lawyers, who know all too well how eye witness accounts are easily influenced by things that people only notice because (in some way,) they feel important.

This happens to me all the time with plants.

When I first learned how to identify a Gingko tree, I was suddenly seeing them everywhere. From Sainsbury’s car park, to prints on greetings cards - it was almost as if the tree was in some strange way, calling out to make itself known. It’s easy to shrug these things off as trivial coincidences, but when it comes to plants, I feel these encounters have more significance.

Or maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, my “plant of the moment” is Herb Robert (or as children in the past liked to call him,) Stinky Bob.

It started last Wednesday. My neighbour texted to say she had been gardening, and knowing my penchant for weeds, had left a carrier bag full of Herb Robert on my doorstep.

On Thursday I was relaxing in a beer garden, when I suddenly noticed I was surrounded by pretty pink flowers, which here, had been made into a feature of a beautiful herbaceous border, rather than viewed as a pesky weed.

My third encounter in as many days came in the form of an email sent to me be a fellow herbalist. She wanted to know if I’d ever made an ointment with Herb Robert, and if so, what colour it had turned out? I hadn’t, and so I didn’t know - but with a huge bag of Herb Robert at my disposal, it felt rude not to make this my next project.