Viper's Bugloss

Overview

Viper's bugloss is one of the most intensely blue wildflowers in northern Europe — a column of vivid blue funnel-shaped flowers, each with long red stamens protruding beyond the petals, produced in extraordinary abundance on dry, chalky, sandy ground in July and August, attended constantly by bees. The whole plant is covered in stiff, pale bristles that make it rough to the touch and catching on fabric. The stem is spotted with purple-red markings. The nutlets that follow the flowers are triangular and angular, with a pointed tip. These three features — the spotted stem, the angular nutlets, the bristly covering — were read by Renaissance herbalists through the Doctrine of Signatures as indicators of the plant's use against snake-bite and its sympathetic connection to vipers.

Botanical Notes

A biennial, 30–90cm, with a basal rosette of lanceolate leaves in the first year and a stout, branching, bristly flowering stem in the second, bearing many curved cymes of funnel-shaped flowers that open pink and deepen to vivid blue as they mature, from June to September. The protruding red stamens and the colour change are characteristic. Found on chalk and limestone grassland, coastal dunes, shingle, and disturbed sandy soils throughout Europe; particularly abundant on exposed chalk and sand. One of the most important nectar sources for bumblebees and solitary bees in late summer on dry soils. Contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids (echimidine and related compounds) with hepatotoxic potential.

Lore & History

The name bugloss means ox-tongue, from the Greek *bous* (ox) and *glossa* (tongue), referring to the rough, tongue-shaped leaves — an older naming tradition than the viper one, and a different animal. The viper connection appears in Renaissance botany, where the spotted stem, read as snake scales, made the plant an obvious candidate for treatment of snake-bite under the Doctrine of Signatures. Dioscorides recommended the root and seeds drunk in wine as a preventative against viper venom. Whether this worked is not recorded in the case reports. Culpeper placed the plant under Jupiter, correcting what he considered excessive dependence on Doctrine of Signatures reasoning without quite abandoning it. The bees that attend the plant in summer are indifferent to all of this; they are there because the flowers produce nectar at concentrations among the highest of any British wildflower.

Warnings