~ "Mother went rambling, and came back with a burdock on her shawl, so we know that the snow has perished from the earth." - Emily Dickinson, Letters of Emily Dickinson
~ "The crops perish, and up springs a rough forest of burdocks and caltrops; and hurtful cockles and sterile oats reign in the cultivated fields." -- Virgil, Georgics, translated/edited by Henry David Thoreau, The Dispersion of Seeds, published posthumously as Faith in a Seed, Edited by Bradley P. Dean
~ "We often say that a person's clothes are old and seedy, which may mean that they are far gone and dilapidated like a plant that is gone to seed - or, possibly, that they are made untidy by many seeds adhering to them. So with the fruit of the burdock, with which children are wont to build houses and barns without any mortar: both men and animals, apparently such as have shaggy coats, are employed in transporting them. I have even relieved a cat with a large mass of them which she could not get rid of, and I frequently see a cow with a bunch in the end of her whisking tail, which, perhaps, she stings herself in her vain efforts to brush off imagined flies." -- Henry David Thoreau, The Dispersion of Seeds, published posthumously as Faith in a Seed, Edited by Bradley P. Dean
~ "I learned that a young lady's mother, who one day took a turn in the garden in order to pluck a nose-gay, just before setting out on a journey, found that she had carried a surprising quantity of this [burdock] seed to Boston on her dress, without knowing it -- for the flowers that invite you to look at and pluck them have designs on you -- and the railroad company charged nothing for freight." Ibid.
~ "I am a kind of burr; I shall stick." -- Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
~ The species name is thought to come from the word lappa to mean burr in the Latin, and "to seize" in the Greek.
~ During WWI, the supply of pharmaceutical plants to Europe was interrupted and every patriotic effort was made to cultivate them at home. Burdock was among the medicinal plants listed as being in shortage as proclaimed by the British Board of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1914.
Some Recipes...
Oven Baked Brown Rice with Burdock & Shiitake
2 cups boiling water 2 cups cold water
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