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Adam’s Fig Leaf?

© Gregg Pasterick

Every once in a while I'll read a comic that's a laugh-aloud keeper. Dutifully, I clip it out of the newspaper and stick it up on the fridge. I've done this for years, accumulating a collection of yellowed comics that have been, ahem, archived in folders, packed in boxes and stacked up in a storage space in Asheville, N.C.

One of the most memorable (i.e. one of the funniest) of all these many cartoons was clipped from the college paper at Ohio State more than 20 years ago. In it a pair of young men, dressed only in fig leaves, stand side by side. One of the young men has a relaxed, confident, self-assured expression on his face. The other, wide-eyed, dares gaze toward the nether-regions of his companion. The young man whose expression exudes confidence is clothed in a fig leaf more than 3 times the size of his companion's little bit of foliage.

Two guys, a pair of fig leaves, an astounded, perhaps envious glance and a ton of innuendo. Not even a caption. It was hilarious.

Years later, out in the garden and up to my eyebrows in burdock, that cartoon came screaming out of the past, and I realized what sort of 'fig' leaf the well-endowed fellow wore. It had to be a burdock leaf; a big, ovate, up to 20" long burdock leaf. Great Burdock (Arctium lappa), to be exact.

Great Burdock is a dramatic, science fiction-big plant. A bane to gardeners and a boon to herbalists, it produces burs in the autumn that grab onto anything that brushes up against it, insuring seed dispersal far and wide.

The pink to lavender flowers of Great Burdock are small and frail-looking, but they grow together in spiny-looking flower heads about 2" across. These spiny-looking flower heads become, of course, the burs. The plant grows to a light-headed 9' in height. Its cousin, Common Burdock (A. minus), grows to 5' and is the runt of the litter. Both are Old World plants, introduced and long ago naturalized in North America.

A biennial that easily grows from seed, burdock - either one - can really make a mess of an orderly garden, towering over small plants like Godzilla squishing Boy Scouts. For some however, burdock is the garden.

This horror movie wildflower is favored by herbalists, and is often grown with culinary uses in mind.

Dried burdock root has been used as a blood purifier, a diuretic and a laxative. The leaves have been used in a poultice to treat bruises, burns and swollen knees. A recipe for a poultice to treat gout involved boiling the leaves, with bran, in urine. Yuck.

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