A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
toadflax
Toadflax is a plant of dry banks, walls, and waste ground with narrow gray-green leaves and spikes of two-lipped flowers in yellow and orange, shaped like a small snapdragon with a long spur behind. The mouth is held shut and only a heavy insect can force it open, so it is pollinated almost entirely by bumblebees. Ivy-leaved toadflax is the small lilac one that grows out of old walls.
Etymology
The name joins two observations. The leaves resemble flax, which is what the second half records, and the flower was thought to resemble a small open mouth, which is where the toad comes in; the same reasoning gives it the names toad’s mouth and calf’s snout in other languages. Linnaeus named the genus for the flax resemblance in Latin.
Notes
Ivy-leaved toadflax does something worth watching for. Its flower stalks grow toward the light while flowering and then reverse and grow away from it once the seed sets, pushing the capsule back into a crack in the wall where the seed can germinate. It arrived in Britain from the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century and has colonized old masonry across the country.