On Henbits and Deadnettles
There’s two weeds that you all see and probably don’t give a second thought to. You find them in lawns, along the roadsides, gardens, the edge of sidewalks—blooming this time of year— happy that spring is here and winter is on its way out.
If you weed your garden, you pull them out, trying your best to get rid of them. They are ubiquitous, but likely you don’t even know what they are. Two little plants with purple flowers. Flowering now, they soon disappear into the warming days.
They have made themselves at home here since the first European settlers arrived and are native to every part of temperate Europe and Asia. One is the purple deadnettle (Lamium purpureum), also known by the common names red archangel, red dead nettle and dee nettle in their English homeland. The other is its close relative, Henbit deadnettle (Lamium amplexicaule). “Lamium” derives from a Greek word meaning “the throat” referring the constricted flowers tubes. Let’s take one at a time.
“The plant diffuses a heavy and disagreeable odour, especially when bruised, and a nauseous, herbaceous, sub-astringent taste. Water extracts the whole of its sensible qualities,” wrote the authors of British Flora Medica in 1838.
In the early 18th century, Linnaeus wrote that the peasantry of Sweden boiled the herb as a pot herb. However, in Great Britain of 1792, Thomas Martyn in Flora Rustica, observed “it is a common weed in kitchen gardens and corn-fields, flowering very early… As a medical plant it is disused; nor it is ever, as we believe, eaten among us as a pot-herb, whatever they may do in Upland, a province of Sweden.”
Lamium amplexicaule, Henbit deadnettle, is the other, and the more attractive of the two. These members of the mint family that bloom at the same time, and they’re often found together. It, too, is from Europe and Asia, and naturalized in the United States at an early date. In preparation for eating weeds during war time, in 1942-43, George Washington Carver his Tuskegee Bulletin “Nature’s Garden for Victory and Peace” he suggested adding the leaves mixed with salad greens or eaten alone, it could be used either in a cooked or uncooked salad.
“Try it, you’ll like it,” is not an axiom that applies to this plant, but the flowers make an attractive addition to salads.