FINDING interesting wild flowers at the end of October would seem like a long shot. Weird and wonderful mushrooms are a much safer bet.

However, there are some real crackers to be found out on the sandy acid grasslands around the district and being Halloween time, one in particular seems to be most aptly named – the Devil’s Bit Scabious.

The Devil’s Bit Scabious is a magnificent wild flower. For a start, it is lovely and large, having florets of deep purplish blue flowers which can be up to 40mm across, and they really stand out at this increasingly bleak time of year.

It starts to feel very strange to me how such a beautiful and cheery looking flower ended up with such a demonic sounding common name.

It is not even if this common name is just referred to in England but the plant has a similar name across its range in mainland Europe.

Perhaps because it was due to the plant having some horrible poisonous properties but this to seems not to be the case.

Looking the plant up in old herbals, Devil’s Bit Scabious would seem to be a widely used and most useful of herbs.

Past uses have included being the ingredients of a tea to help with coughs and colds, as part of a shampoo to rid the scalp of dandruff and as an ointment to ease the effects of bruising and rashes. Some more optimistic uses were as a preventive medicine to ward off the plague and all forms of pestilent diseases and as a cure for the bites from all types of poisonous animals.

So it would seem that Devil’s Bit Scabious was one of the more useful of plants to come across it in ancient times and in part this is half of the story of where its name came from.

The second half to the origin of the name comes from the Devil's Bit Scabious’s root.

When young the plant has a small carrot shaped root but as the plant grows the tip of the carrot shaped root dies away and is replaced by lateral roots extending from the rest of the “carrot”.

The dead part of the root decays and breaks off, so when you dig up a Devil’s Bit Scabious it looks as though the end of the root has broken or been bitten off.

From the combination of the above a legend was born and the plant got its name.

The legend of the plant’s name appears in the late 16th century herbal written by John Gerard and tells a story of how the Devil’s Bit Scabious was one of the plants that were found growing in the paradise garden of Eden.

The Devil on inspecting the Scabious found it was truly a magnificent herb with many beneficial uses to mankind.

Being a malevolent evil creature this incensed the Devil and in a fit of spite it bit off the scabious’s root to kill the plant, but miraculously it survived but not with out the scars on its root from the Devil’s bite.

Hence the wonderful name of Devil’s Bit Scabious.