Bitter harvest of mallow
‘Would you believe it, the autumnal rains have brought forth in crop more bountiful than ever those accursed marshmallows,’ complained my great grandfather to his son in 1919, ‘the docks we utterly routed but the others will apparently plague and cumber the ground for years’. Would ancestral Irish knowledge have changed his tune?
I discovered Alexis Nelson’s @blackforager Instagram account in 2022, introducing me to the concept of foraging. I knew that people hunted for mushrooms and picked blackberries and I had heard about the benefits of dandelion and camomile tea but I didn’t know much about the medicinal purposes of plants and weeds or the indigenous and Black roots of foraging in America, the latter of which is a significant part of Nelson’s oeuvre. In a New York Times article on Nelson, Justin Robinson, an ethnobotanist, farmer and cultural historian, ‘rejects the term “foraging” and its practice as anything new to Black Americans and humans in general’. The article noting, ‘Black American history is also a series of profound land-related ruptures, starting with enslavement and forced agricultural labor on territory inhabited by — and taken from — Native peoples. The slave master’s meager rations turned the enslaved into naturalists out of both necessity and opportunity.’[i]
Wild caperberries growing in stone wall in Positano
I was in a taxi leaving Positano in Italy on a recent trip, and was amazed to hear that at night time, local women would gather caperberries growing wild on the steep rockface that hugs Positano’s winding coastal road. They chose the cover of night time when the traffic was at its most minimal. In England, on a different trip, tramping around with my host family’s walking group, I found out juniper and sloe berries are foraged to flavour gin. Following Palestinians on social media speaking out against Israel’s illegal occupation, I was shocked to learn that Israel had banned the practice of harvesting wild thyme, oregano and marjoram to make za’atar, a spice highly prized in Palestinian cooking and cultural heritage. Under the pretext of ‘endangered plant species’ the Israelis’ enacted a law in 1977 to ban the picking, possessing, or trading of the wild plant growing in the occupied territories of Palestine with a conviction penalty of substantial fines or up to three years in prison.[ii] The practice of harvesting the wild plant called za’atar handed down from generation to generation in the Levantine region (Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria) is highly symbolic of the enduring inter generational connection to land. In February 2026, Bisan Owda, a prominent Palestinian storyteller and filmmaker surviving what the International Court of Justice is investigating as a genocide in Gaza posted a story on her people surviving a famine cooking the leaves of the common mallow plant, reminding me of my great grandfather’s lament more than 100 years ago.
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Mallows along the Mullum Mullum
I’ve taken to riding over to my father’s place daily, an act of filial piety that I explored in this post. It’s a gorgeous ride for the most part, especially along the Mullum Mullum creek, a tributary of the Yarra River (Birrarung) and the Yarra Valley. I noticed on my ride, to use my great-grandfather’s language, a bountiful crop of mallows, and on my return, I immediately looked them up in my ‘Weed Forager’s Handbook: A Guide to edible and medicinal weeds in Australia’.
‘The ancient Romans considered mallow a delicacy, and to this day mallow species (both wild-harvested and cultivated) are widely eaten throughout the Mediterranean, Middle East, Northern Africa and China. Mallow grows year-round, has a pleasant and mild flavour… Mallow is one of the earliest plants mentioned in recorded literature. In 30 BC the Roman poet Horace wrote: ‘Me pascunt olivae, me cichorea, levsque malvae’ (I graze on olives, chicory and simple mallow). He believed that mallow ‘develops the intellectual faculties’. Pliny clamed that, ‘whosoever shall take a spoonful of the mallows shall that day be free from all malades’ and to this day there is a saying in southern Italy, ‘la malva, da ogni male ti salva’ (mallow saves you from every disease). Dioscorides recommended mallow for the treatment of burns and skin inflammations, spider bites, bee and wasp stings, bowel and urinary problems.’[iii]
Common Mallow (Malva parvilflora)
I wondered about my great grandfather’s bitter invectives: ‘accursed’, ‘plague’ and ‘cumber’. He sees the mallows as weeds, not nourishment. ‘Taken as a whole, weeds are not so much a botanical as a human psychological category’ notes Professor William Stearn.[iv] Juxtaposing my great grandfather’s views with the cultural heritage of foraged foods, what was the prevailing Irish knowledge about mallows?
‘Local Cures’ The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0690, Page 114.
Lus na meall Muire (Common Mallow)
Academic papers looking into the plant and medicinal knowledge held by Irish women exist, but I am particularly interested folklore about mallow in the villages and counties of my great grandfather’s people.
My great grandfather, John Sheehy Meagher, left the homeplace in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland as a three-year old to be reunited with his parents in Australia in 1866. However, in a cruel twist of fate, his mother, Margaret Sheehy, died around the time of his arrival, severing him from the Irish knowledge that she might have passed onto him. His father, Michael Meagher from Dunkerrin in County Offaly (formerly King’s County) married Johanna Ryan, a Catholic Irish hotelkeeper from Drom, County Tipperary. [v]
After Ireland became a free state, a Commission was established to collect folklore, traditional knowledge and oral history around the country. It is an incredible collection recognised by UNESCO and held at the University College Dublin.[vi] The School’s Collection of folklore took place from the 1937-1939 and has a category of folk medicine and local cures. The project recorded ‘in excess of 750,000 pages of local history and oral tradition.’[vii] Mallow is commonly found in the documents listing herbs and old cures predominantly proscribed for swelling, sprains, and burns, and occasionally for jaundice and bronchitis.
From John’s birthplace, comes the following old lore, ‘There is an herb growing in Ballintotty old castle called Marsh Mallow which cures Yellow Jaundice. This old castle is about four miles outside Nenagh.’ [viii] In Drom, one account notes, ‘Marsh-mallows were also used for drawing matter out of a cut or a wound.’[ix] At St. Cronan’s Longford Wood (An Teampoll Mór) school in Tipperary, south of Dunkerrin, docks were described as ‘this weed is also very common in the district; it thrives only in deep rich soil; the roots are very strong, tough, and numerous, and, like squitch grass, the smallest portion left in the ground will produce a new plant. Local people say that “docks” are a sign of good land.’[x] Today, Matthew Evan writes in his book on Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy, ‘a weed is simply a plant in the wrong place. Weeds are not bad in or of themselves, but rather can be a useful telltale symptom of soil. Dock, a broad-leafed tannic-flavoured, deep rooted plant thrives where soil is dense, where it’s a bit airless and compacted.’[xi]
Curiously, whilst there were references of famine survivors eating grass, there were no references that I saw of mallow being consumed to survive the starvation that hollowed out Ireland’s population. John’s own maternal grandfather, John Sheehy tried to do his in bit in Whitegate rallying against the colonial-imposed starvation. This was not a story I learnt handed down from generation to generation, but found buried in the Clonrush Parish’s births and marriages register. You can read that story here.
Stories born of the land
Naturally, I am curious about what stories are handed down from generation to generation. Given how close in time John lived to the An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger), he is a child of the generation who lived through it, there is no evidence of stories about this harrowing time in what remains in the family archives (that I have discovered so far). His father and step-mother both born in the early 1830s grew up on farms in rural Ireland surviving the famine from 1845-1849. I recall how a conversation with an elderly Irish man on a visit to Ireland in 2018 brought home to me how visceral An Gorta Mór lives on today’s generations (you can read about that here). Rebecca Solnit, an American writer with Irish heritage wrote, ‘I heard a story once about a tourist who goes to a pub in Ireland, where the locals so incite him with outrage over the deeds of the English that he starts off drunkenly to right the wrongs, and they have to hold him down and explain that it all happened several lifetimes ago, however vividly it lives in their conversation.’ She goes on to tell another story at the opposite end of the spectrum, ‘I met an Irishman who’d emigrated to South Africa and cursed Ireland for its inability to outlive the past: his new home, he asserted in the wake of President Mandela’s inauguration, would set the past behind it, heal the historical wounds, and invent a new nation.’ [xii]
Perhaps that’s the key. Living on the land with the memory steeped in the stories, the retelling, the reliving, fades away on other lands with different deep time memories and historical wounds. The colonialisation of someone else’s land may, at first, enable a new identity to be forged until the memories of the settled land resurface if not through truth telling, through the cracks of suppression, notable and subtle absences, unexplained questions or answers hiding the logical premises of the situation. Inevitably, memories, like the common mallow, pop up following a disturbance. However, the disturbance might not take place for generations having lain dormant in the soil of life.
Postscript
A famine is well documented in Gaza, Bisan Owda’s homeland. Should you wish to donate to a charity supported by Bisan Owda, visit Ele Elna Elak.
From their website: ‘Ele Elna Elak is a volunteer-driven initiative dedicated to supporting Palestinian families in need. Since 2018, we’ve worked to provide food, clothing, and essentials. We are a campaign rooted in the profound belief that “What we own, you own…” (Ele Elna Elak). This Arabic phrase symbolizes our commitment to social solidarity and the importance of sharing resources to uplift our community.’
End notes
[i] Cynthia Greenlee, ‘How Black foragers find freedom in a natural world’ in The New York Times, July 30, 2021
[ii] Brian Boyd, ‘A Political Ecology of Za’Atar’ in EnviroSociety, 15 June 2016
[iii] Adam Grubb and Annie Raser-Rowland, The Weed Forager’s Handbook: a Guide to edible and medicinal weeds in Australia, Hyland House Publishing Melbourne 2012, reprinted 2022, pp.64-68.
[iv] Grubb, op.cit., p. 10
[v] BDM: Death Certificate, Johanna Ryan, 1893, 16006 / 1893
[vi] The National Folklore Collection
[vii] University College Dublin, The Schools Collection,
[viii] Margaret Tobin, School: Aonach Urmhumhan, Clochar na Trócaire, Local Cures, p.340.
[ix] Margaret Troy, School: An Drom (Drom Thurles) (roll number 585), Local Cures, p.284.
[x] Joe Maher, School: St. Cronan’s Longford Wood, An Teampoll Mór (roll number 6662), Herbs, p.248.
[xi] Matthew Evans, Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy, Allan and Unwin, 2021 p.152.
[xii] Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations: Some passages in Ireland, Verso, London, 2011, p.70.
Opening line: Letter from JS Meagher to Frank Meagher, April 7 1919, Meagher Family Archive.
