Another lengthy period of bone dry weather broken finally by torrential downpours last week. Another meteorological first for me since being back in the U.K., as I had been going from end to end of the garden watering new plants to keep them alive and establishing, yet the evenings had dipped to 13 degrees and the boys ask if we can light a fire.
Damp conditions at long last encourage the shyer inhabitants out and about more. I am busy tidying and cutting back high summer growth, and near the sweet pea teepees I find a very fine frog in the shade of the thick, felted phlomis leaves.
A couple of youngsters leap away as I move some heavy growth near the potting shed, and tidying up the climbing roses reveals a very sophisticated adult, gleaming bronze in the late afternoon sun.
Folklore and myths around frogs abound, but for the most part through the years it ended badly for the frogs. In Celtic culture, they were esteemed as representatives of the water spirits, who would bring rain and purification. To have a frog living near your dairy animals was considered lucky. Druids, and then witches, were however thought to use frogs as their familiars, perhaps because of the belief that the hapless amphibians had arisen from the underworld, and so an ever more grisly array of frog-derived cures were developed:
If you put a live frog in your mouth it will cure toothache. You had to rub the frog on the tooth, or chew its leg.
It will cure a cold if you hold a frog by its legs and place it in the sufferer’s mouth for a moment (guaranteed to take your mind off the sniffles if nothing else).
If a child had whooping cough, it could be cured by bringing it to running water, putting a frog into the child’s mouth three times, and then letting the frog swim away uninjured (from the jaws of a distraught child?) It would take the whooping cough with it.
A love charm - bury a live frog in a box and after a few days dig it up. Take the skeleton apart and select a particular bone, place the bone in the clothing of the intended, and they will fall madly in love with you.
The British habit of lobbing ‘frogs’ as a name not quite of endearment at the French has given rise to speculation over the years. The old line that it related to the consumption of frogs’ legs seems finally to have been debunked. A long shot theory attributes it to the Merovingian king Clovis’s standard bearing three frogs in the 6th century, only replaced by the pure white fleur-de-lys when he converted to Catholicism, although three frogs were apparently still the emblem of the Bourbons. Perhaps a more likely source was the habit of the eighteenth century pre revolutionary aristocrats dismissing the common folk as ‘les grenouilles’ when the lower classes were obliged to live in the swampy land around what was to become modern Paris.
Toads, a little less photogenic than their shiny, athletic cousins suffered similar fates, being strongly linked to witches’ spells, and believed for some time to hold precious stones in their heads which if extracted and worn as jewels, would sense venom near the wearer, changing colour to give warning of the imminent threat. More of a threat to the toad, in reality, whose numbers presumably plummeted even further after Shakespeare cited the belief in toad-stones in As You Like It:
“… The toad, ugly and venomous, Weare yet a precious jewel in his head…,” – Act 2, scene 1, 12 -17.
Toads’ ability to excrete a defensive irritant did not aid their monstrous reputation. Feared as instruments of satanic purpose, deployed as instruments of torture, dismembered in order to exert power, we have Kenneth Grahame’s reckless, spendthrift Mr Toad of Toad Hall in 1908 to thank for at least a partial rehabilitation of this poor harmless creature’s name.
As with many myths and folklore tales, mystery and speculation grew up around many birds and beasts when people could not understand where or why they disappeared seasonally, or how to explain their behaviour. Swallows and swifts were creatures of magic because how could they vanish at the end of summer then return to the same place each year? Amphibians changed form completely. Seals could be seen on land but then vanished underwater. Newts regrowing limbs. Thankfully enlightenment arrived in more recent times, and when they can survive the systemic destruction of their habitat, the annual assault from herons, rats, foxes, and domestic cats, and in the case of toads, mass slaughter in their stubborn attempts to cross busy main roads, our amphibians are all finally to be prized in the garden as heroic consumers of slugs and snails.
Toads and frogs fade into insignificance in comparison to our newts. I wrote in “Hic Sunt Dracones” about my various encounters with our great crested newts, and here was a very relaxed female lounging under the damp herbs just the other day.
We are blessed with all three U.K. varieties of newt (great crested, smooth and palmate), a great good fortune of which we were unaware until our neighbour Will, who works for our local Wildlife Trust, asked if he could come round and borrow some of our newts. Newt-borrowing was not a custom with which I was familiar, but we acceded, on the understanding that this was for a wildlife ‘show and tell’ at nearby ponds, and that the newts would be treated royally. This prompted the obvious question as to how one collects a newt, and the answer turns out to be through their insatiable curiosity. Will unloaded rafts of large, clean plastic soda bottles, each held steady with a bamboo cane, plunged these into our murky old pond and departed for the night. The next morning he returned and showed us a bountiful and varied collection of newts, who then set off on their celebrity tour. I stifled all jocular or punning impulses, as this was clearly serious business, but remembering my utter astonishment at encountering a large great crested male ambling around in our downstairs cloakroom one winter’s night, I did smile at the evidence of their curiosity. Apparently they all behaved themselves, no diva strops, and were safely back home that evening. Dreaming of fame and fortune, perhaps.
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