I’m fairly certain that I’ve gone on about Colt’s foot elsewhere on my websites, so I’ll only add a little bit of information here….Flowering as early as February and even during the hardest of winters, the merest hint of sunshine is likely to encourage this plucky little member of the Daisy family to burst into flower and add one of the year’s first splashes of colour to an otherwise barren-seeming landscape.It’s called Colt’s foot simply because the shape of the leaves look a bit like the outline of a horse’s hoof. However, the leaves don’t actually appear until the plant itself has finished flowering, an unusual phenomenon that ultimately resulted in the plant being given its alternative country name of “Son-Before-Father"Meanwhile, it can be a very useful plant in a survival situation as both the very long hairs on the seed parachutes (see photo below) and the down found on the underside of the leaves make excellent fire-starting tinder when dry.

According to the excellent “Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Britain”, the leaves were once dried, crushed and smoked by asthma sufferers to provide effective relief from their condition, while juice extracted from the leaves was considered to be a cure for coughs. In fact, the plant’s scientific name of Tussilago farfara provides a clue to this in that Tussilago comes from the Greek word “tussis” meaning “cough”. I believe that extract of Colt’s Foot is still used in various homeopathic remedies to this day.I suppose I could also happen to mention my Gran for the gazillionth time because she used to add a distillation of Colts Foot to my Uncle Bill’s cider of an evening to help break up the excessive amounts of thick, tarry phlegm forming in his lungs caused by him being such a heavy smoker. She always made sure she didn’t add too much however because she said that Colt’s Foot remedies could be bad for the liver!Incidentally, who’s that guy from Kew Gardens doing all the natural remedy stuff on TV at the moment? Calls himself an Ethno Botonist or somesuch pretentious crp. Well, that so and so has simply nicked all my Gran’s remedies, added a few scientific names and formulas to give them 21st Century credibility and claimed them as his own….Wnker!

Dear common flower that grow'st beside the way
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold
First pledge of blithesome May Which children pluck and, full of pride, uphold
 High-hearted buccaneers, o'erjoyed that they
 An Eldorado in the grass have found Which not the rich earth's ample round
  May match in wealth, thou art more dear to me
  Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)