This page is about Plantains commonly found in the UK.
Ribwort Plantain, Plantago lanceolata, is a common native wildflower throughout the UK, where it grows almost anywhere there is soil: grasslands, field edges, roadsides and even in sand dunes. I found a specimen, seen in the small picture below, by the wooden walkway on a beach in the Scottish borders.
It’s also quite happy to pop up in cultivated ground and well-kept lawns, where it is often regarded as an intrusive weed. However, its attraction for pollinators and its medicinal properties are good reasons to let it alone, as we have done: the main image shows it flourishing in the Physic Garden.
Tiny white stamens protrude from the miniature rugby ball of the flower head, that sits on a thin, but strong and wiry, stem above the basal rosette of spear-shaped leaves. The flowering season is between April and October, when it attracts small butterflies, moths and hoverflies; and the seed heads remain as a useful food for seed-eating birds during winter.
The second part of its botanical name means lanceolate or lance-shaped, because the leaf is narrow and tapers to a point; this gives it another common name, Narrow-leaf Plantain.
A close relative, also found widely in the British Isles, is the Common or Greater Plantain, Plantago major: this one has broad, oval or rounded leaves. The densely packed flower head rises in a tall spike from the leaf-rosette, and gives it the less appealing common name of Rat’s Tail Plantain. The flowers are tiny, greenish-yellow, and each plant can produce thousands of seeds – hence known as intrusive, not to mention invasive, from the gardener’s point of view!
This image of Greater Plantain is taken from the Wildflower Finder website, copyright of Roger Darlington.
Medicinal Properties
These two plantains have similar medicinal properties. Ribwort Plantain is known to be very effective applied to nettle stings or insect bites as an anti-histamine, and is also anti-fungal, anti-oxidant and analgesic. It has mild antibiotic properties, and the leaves can be used to make a herbal tisane as a cough medicine.
Culinary Properties
Our plantains are not related to the vegetable Plantain, a type of Banana originating in the tropics. Like them, though, it is edible; although the leaves, even when young, are much too bitter to eat raw. The flower heads, however, once they’ve turned brown, but not yet dry, can be collected to make a mushroom-flavoured vegetable stock.
Childhood associations
Older folk may remember childhood games, twisting the tough flexible stems of Ribwort Plantain to ‘shoot’ the heads like a pop-gun. Cicely Mary Barker even included a Ribwort Plantain Fairy in her illustrated ‘Flower Fairies’ series of books (1948), with a rather nonchalant elf apparently whistling at a snail, while leaning, hands in pockets, against the stem of her finely drawn plantain.
Acknowledgements – Thanks to the following for much of this information
https://www.wildlifetrusts.org
