Vegetable blood changes colour in the leaves; experiment with spurge; with picris.

Those performing now in Dublin gardens include chickweed, hairy bittercress, spurge and speedwell.

One squirt in the eye from spurge sap and you're blind.

Why, it is only great spurge, such as grows in the woods at home.

Irish spurge, the poacher's old reliable for trapping salmon in these parts, is fully grown.

But why is it that this spurge, and St. Patrick's cabbage, grow only here in the west?

There I find something that approaches companionship in the prickly juniper, the narcotic hellebore, and the acrid spurge.

Plantains and docks, wild spurge, hops climbing up a dead fir tree, a well-chosen pole for them-nothingis omitted.

There is marjoram and sage, clary, spearmint, peppermint, salsify, elecampane, tansy, assafœtida, coriander, angelica, caper spurge, lamb's lettuce, and sorrel.

Photograph: Alamy But saps and juices aside, don't be put off growing wood spurge in the garden; just handle it with care.

Pound together garlic and laserpitium juice, add to this mixture some Laconian spurge, and rub it well into the eyelids at night.

For the whole of winter, the spurge sits as a spindly bush, its dusty and jaded leaves reddened by the winter chill.

It is Irish spurge which grows here, and sometimes in Devonshire, and then again in the west of Europe, down to the Pyrenees.

This spurge goes through an extraordinary metamorphosis at this time of year, as the first buds are thinking about breaking on woody boughs overhead.

July 6th - July 13th AFTER mid summer many of the Euphorbia or spurge family begin to look jaded.

I recognized some spurges that let their caustic, purgative sap trickle out.