Memories of privet in Torbay

 

In an earlier blog post, I described the wonderful scent of honeysuckle and its reputation for inciting thoughts of love, especially in girls [1]. Another plant that flowers in July is privet, very common as a hedging plant and described by the Royal Horticultural Society as having “panicles of small, often unpleasantly scented white flowers” [2] (see above). This is a subjective judgement, of course, but most people would agree with the RHS, as they walk past flowering privet hedges. 

For me, the smell of privet flowers brings back a very strong childhood memory of trainspotting on summer Saturdays in Torbay. This is what I wrote in Walking with Gosse [3]:  

For me, the constant arrival of trains was exciting. Not because of the crowds of holidaymakers, that were just a blur, but for the chances of trainspotting and seeing locomotives from distant places far beyond Bristol. I don’t know why trainspotting was such a passion for me as a boy, but it was. Even today, the smell of privet flowers reminds me of happy walks through the local park to the railway station and the anticipation of gaining new entries in my Ian Allan Combined Volume. 

I was brought up in Paignton and, as a child, Bristol to me was in the far north. Large numbers of visitors swelled the local population during the summer months and an indication of the amount of holiday traffic is shown in the photograph below (taken from the excellent book Summer Saturdays in the West [4] and showing a typical scene at Torquay from August 1957, the time when I pressed up against the railings at Paignton railway station). On the left, we see a crowded platform of returning holidaymakers about to board their train home, while the opposite platform is empty and awaiting the next delivery of excited passengers coming to start their holiday by the sea. The small locomotive at the rear of the heavy train was needed to assist the train engine in tackling Torre bank and another of these “bankers”, having drifted back from Torre station, waits on the central line ready to buffer up to the rear of the next arrival from Paignton. Once past the bank, there was a clear passage to Newton Abbot, where the lines from Torquay joined those from Plymouth and Cornwall. Newton Abbot was a mecca for trainspotters in those days, as pilot engines were needed over the South Devon banks and the locomotive shed that provided them (code 83A) was adjacent to the station. There was always lots to see, and three years after the time mentioned in the quote above, I still made occasional trips up to Newton Abbot to spend a day trainspotting. They didn’t have the same spell as those of earlier days, perhaps because powerful diesels were starting to appear and, anyway, I was growing away from my childhood passion for collecting numbers. I think my Ian Allan Combined Volume was thrown away. 

The scent of privet doesn’t only evoke memories for people, it also attracts pollinating insects that allow fertilisation of the plant in return for the “gift” of nectar. This association evolved way before humans came on the scene, and privet is also used as a food plant by insects, including the privet hawk moth caterpillar (see below), with the dark berries produced in autumn providing food for birds. It is a successful hedging plant because of its vigorous growth and its ability to tolerate some loss of leaves; strategies that evolved to cope with attacks by insects and other animals. But back to privet flowers: “unpleasantly scented” they may be, but they are special for me. Isn’t it strange how smells, transient as they are, can have such a strong effect on the memory? 

(As an aside, it is also of note that privet has been used in folk medicine for centuries, as a means of reducing inflammation [5]. Studies continue to examine some of the component chemicals in leaves and this may lead to the development of new medicines [5,6].)

 

[1] https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-beauty-of-honeysuckle.html 

[2] https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/10108/i-Ligustrum-vulgare-i/Details 

[3] Roger S Wotton (2020) Walking with Gosse: Natural History, Creation and Religious Conflicts. e-book. 

[4] David StJohn Thomas and Simon Rocksborough Smith (1973) Summer Saturdays in the West. Newton Abbot, David & Charles. 

[5] Anna Macková, Pavel Mučaji, Ute Widowitz and Rudolf Bauer (2013) In vitro anti-inflammatory activity of Ligustrum vulgare extracts and their analytical characterization. Natural Products Communications 8: 1509-1512. 

[6] A. Pieroni, P. Pachaly, Y. Huang, B. Van Poel and A. J. Vlietinck (2000) Studies on anti-complementary activity of extracts and isolated flavones from Ligustrum vulgare and Phillyrea latifolia leaves (Oleaceae). Journal of Ethnopharmacology 70: 213-217.