Common St John’s Wort
A member of the geranium family, Herb Robert is also unkindly called Stinky Robert. Not the most fragrant flower in Nature, it tends to lurk in rather dingy places – shaded spots in hedges, neglected gardens, waste places, and coastal thickets – in soil rich in organic matter.
In the wild, its distribution is worldwide ranging from lowland woods to mountain beech forests, where it grows chiefly in shaded woodlands and thickets, and is often found in the vicinity of human dwellings.
People in later life ascribed to the plant the power of driving away demons – it was known as fuga daemonum. in Latin – and looked upon it as a form of protection against evil spirits during illness.
Common St John’s Wort grows on sunny banks, in pastures, clearings, hedgerows, and fallow land, from lowland to mountain elevations practically throughout Europe. This is one of a group of many woodland plants (such as Stellaria holostea and Fragaria vesea) which `starve’ in the forest during the summer months because there is insufficient light. It is not until the autumn, when the trees begin to shed their leaves and let more light through, that photosynthesis in their tissues is renewed to any great degree. It is this light factor which accounts for the Common St John’s Worts seen on the forest edge being larger and more robust than those growing in undergrowth.
Herb Robert is an annual herb, 10-50 cm high, with a stout rhizome and a branched stem. The opposite leaves are composed of three leaflets, bipinnatifid. The small dull-pink flowers are borne from May until October.
The fruit of geraniums is long and beaked. When ripe, it splits and separates into five sections, releasing the seeds to be dispersed far from the parent plant. Later, all that remains on the plant are spiralled partitions and a long flower axis, like the frame of an old-fashioned umbrella which has lost its cover.
