Nipplewort - yup!

[00:00:00]How are your nipples? Are they sore, weeping, dry, funny colored, smelly, saggy, tight, huge, sensitive, hardly noticeable? Do you have five of them? If so, fear not, because this can help you.

[00:00:14]Yes, let's take a trip down mammary lane, because believe it or not, this plant has the comedy moniker of nipplewort. But is it death or nipples?

[00:00:26]>> [screaming] >> Yes, nipplewort. I do love a plant with a good comedy name. Why on earth is it called nipplewort? Well, it's our old friend the doctrine of signatures. When something looks like something, um people thought that's what it could help with. Um in this case, apparently this looks like nipples. Does it? Well, if you look closely at the end, I suppose it looks a little bit like a very sore dogger's nipple from someone who's been going through their midlife crisis and charging around parks and things to the point where the nipples have been worn down. They look like an old swan vestas match. And so therefore, apparently it was good for all kinds of nipple related conditions, I suppose, things like mastitis or nipple fire or nipple ache or nipple weeping.

[00:01:00]>> [laughter] >> I don't Suddenly it occurred to me, I know nothing about nipple diseases. Is it death or dinner or death or nipple?

[00:01:06]Well, it is edible. I mean, it's not especially tasty. It's like one of these survival type foods, really. You could probably put the young leaves in a salad. Actually quite an easy thing to identify. You could probably confuse it with something like hawk's beard, um but it does have these rather sort of interesting um arrow shaped leaves with these sort of lovely sort of pointy bits on the side of them. Um and when you see that with the dark stalk, little yellow flowers. So, not much good for your nipples and pretty boring to eat. So, what's the point of it? Well, actually of course, lovely little flowers. And this time of year, in between spring and summer, um sometimes aren't that many flowers. Um and so this is a great one for the bees. And of course, every time I see it, I titter like an 11-year-old schoolboy.