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Independently of the great use of hops in making beer, and for medicinal uses, where the plant grows wild, it affords the neighbours a dainty in the spring months. The young shoots, called hop-tops, when boiled, are equal in flavour to asparagus, and are eagerly sought after for that purpose. LADIES-SMOCK. Cardamine pratensis. This is good as a salad herb. LAVER. Fucus esculentus.
There was a marsh marigold in it, with stems a quarter of an inch thick; and in the grass on the verge, but just beyond where the flood reached, grew the lilac-tinted cuckoo flowers, or cardamine. The side hatch supplied a pond, which was only divided from the brook by a strip of sward not more than twenty yards across.
Med. vol. ii. p. 270. CARDAMINE pratensis. LADIES SMOCK. The Leaves. L. E. D. Long ago it was employed as a diuretic; and, of late, it has been introduced in nervous diseases, as epilepsy, hysteria, choraea, asthma, &c. A dram or two of the powder is given twice or thrice a-day. It has little sensible operation. CARUM Carui. CARAWAY. The Seeds.
The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows was preeminently the hawthorn, known often just as "the may." But there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy flowers, Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower and the name is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold, Caltha palustria, often known, less lovingly, as "blobs."
Add to this list the Berberis asiatica, Clematis nutans, Thalictrum glyphocarpum, 27 grasses, Cardamine, etc., and the mountain top presents a mixture of the plants of a damp hot, a dry hot, and of a temperate climate, in fairly balanced proportions.
Walking through the grass, and thinking of the dew and the beautiful morning sunshine, I scarcely noticed the quantity of cuckoo-flowers, or cardamine, till presently it occurred to me that it was very late in the season for cuckoo-flowers and stooping I picked one, and in the act saw it was an orchis the early purple.
The draining, indeed, has made it more comfortable to walk about on, and some of the rougher grasses have gone from the furrows, diminishing at the same time the number of cardamine flowers; but of these there are hundreds by the side of every tiny rivulet of water, and the aquatic grasses flourish in every ditch.
The same thing happens season after season, so that when once you know these places you can always hear the birds several days before other people. With flowers it is the same; the lesser celandine, the marsh marigold, the silvery cardamine, appear first in one particular spot, and may be gathered there before a petal has opened elsewhere.
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