Hills - Comfrey: Past, Present and Future

Russian comfrey is a perennial fodder crop, in the lucerne class for nutritional value but with a vastly greater yield. This yield, in from six to eight cuts between early April and the end of November, totals forty tons an acre for a poor crop, and a hundred tons for a good one. It is a member of the order Boraginaceae and therefore avoids the galaxy of viruses and eelworms that beset so many modern crops. Its high average protein of 24 per cent of the dry matter, and low average fibre at 10 per cent when cut at the leafy stage, makes it ideally suited for pigs and poultry.

Russian comfrey is a weed: no stock will eat it; its yield in dry matter per acre is below that of orthodox fodder crops; it is impossible to get rid of, and fit only for a half-hearted trial on an odd corner of land where nothing else will grow. Its possibilities have been greatly overrated by those who sell it at high prices, and nothing reliable is known about it.

For over a hundred and fifty years these opinions in conflict, favourable and unfavourable views, have kept this plant a flying saucer of agriculture, briefly sighted still in the correspondence columns of the farming press. Yet hidden in the recurring controversy lies a crop that could lift the world out of its chronic high-grade protein shortage. Meat, butter, milk, and eggs all demand more space on the land to grow the feed that produces them than do crops for direct human consumption, which are up to eight times as efficient in terms of mouths fed per acre. In Britain we have only one-third of an acre of fertile land for every one of our fifty-three million people, and every year roughly 150,000 thirds go under homes, roads, playing fields and factories . It is only by increasing production from the thirds available for crops (and bringing less fertile land into cultivation) that we can continue to eat, especially when countries overseas do not wish to exchange the produce of their acres for the goods we have to offer.

It is the purpose of this book to clear the myth and mystery from a fodder crop whose yield, with good husbandry, far outweighs its disadvantages, for the general farmer, the pig and poultry farmer, the small-holder, and the amateur gardener and poultry-keeper.

The story of Russian comfrey begins in 1771. In this year Joseph Busch, a nurseryman and landscape gardener of Well Street, Hackney, London E.8, sold his business (which now has a London Passenger Transport Board garage on its site) to Conrade Loddige, another rising nurseryman. With the casual internationalism of the slower but freer world of horses and sailing ships, he had taken a job as head gardener to the Palace of St. Petersburg for the Empress Catherine II (the Great) of Russia. From his new job, some time between 1790 and 1801, he sent back several Symphytums as garden plants, relations of the wild S.officinale, the Common Comfrey, with which they shared the habit of having thirty-six chromosomes in each cell (see ChromosomesAtlasofCultivatedPlants by C. D. Darlington and Dr. E. K. Janaki Ammal, Allen & Unwin).

Messrs. Loddige, now and Sons, had expanded greatly, buying from St. Thomass Hospital the land that is now St. Thomass Square and Loddiges Road, whose name commemorates this famous nursery. Though they were mainly cashing-in on the great days of British greenhouses with stove plants and orchids (they were importing orchids from Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1812, the year of Napoleons retreat from Moscow), they grew a wide range of hardy subjects. These included 1,393 different species and hybrid roses and no fewer than seven Symphytums. The 16th edition of their catalogue, dated 1836, is in the Hackney Public Library. Unfortunately this is not descriptive, but like many of the more dignified publications of this time, consists of names only, rather resembling a Kew hand-list.