The margins of woodland paths are full of woodruff, white on green, and sheltered under trees is the ghost of its scent. Galium odoratum is the sweet woodruff, an erect perennial of limestone woods, 15cm-30cm high with square stems through whorls of up to nine leaves – the ruffs – ending in tight umbels of cross-shaped, bright white flowers that have a vanilla scent.
Woodruff grows in dense rugs in the shady woods of Benthall Edge at the northern limit of Wenlock Edge before it plunges into the River Severn of the Ironbridge Gorge behind Buildwas power station, whose abandoned funnel looms above the tree tops.
The bright sunshine outside the wood and the shade inside it are a distant familiarity, as if winter has lasted ages. In a kind of hazy memory that is now returning with new leaves, flowers, bird song and scents, the eye searches for something definite to focus on, and the woodruff’s clear, apple-green with white starry flowers is such a strong image.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that this plant has had a symbolic, medicinal and folkloric importance throughout Europe for centuries.
Woodruff has a Christian symbolic role as Mary’s bedstraw, a scented comforter for sleep. According to the Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, the poet John Wynn once wrote: “This pretty Puritan I claim, / And Woodruff its charming name.” Wynn’s “Puritan” woodruff was also dedicated to Freya, sister of Odin and goddess of birth, and probably used in cradles, too. It seems to have been an ancient Germanic cult plant and appears in Renaissance herbals as miraculous, uplifting the heart.
The 17th-century English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper regarded woodruff as a lady’s bedstraw, like its cousin the meadowland Galium verum, and as a herb of Venus, “strengthening the parts … which she rules”. Even in modern medicine, it is used in calming and sleep inducing. It is also a traditional ingredient of Cheshire cheese and German May wine.
Although its fragrance causes drowsiness, the sight of woodruff is a strengthening of mood, a kind of subtly stirring music of woodland shadows.
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