Asperimum, Prickly Comfrey, was introduced into this country from the Caucasus in 1811 as a fodder plant. The purple and yellowish flowers are not found mixed where the plants grow wild: the difference in colour is permanent in plants raised from seed.Ī variety with flowers of a rich blue colour S. officinale, with a purplish flower, is more common in many parts of the Continent than in England. The Common Comfrey is abundantly met with in England, but is rare in Scotland the tuberous Comfrey is commonly found in Scotland, but is seldom met with in England, the northern counties of England and North Wales being its extreme southern limit, so that except in the narrow zone of country common to both, there will be no possibility of mistaking the one species for the other. The flowers, creamy-yellow in colour though about the same size as those of S.
officinale in form, but with longer footstalks. The lower radical leaves are much as in S. This is a much smaller plant, the stem rarely more than a foot high, rather slender and leafy. The root-stock is short and horizontal with slender root fibres. Though also covered with hairs, the latter are not so bristly. In this form, the stem is scarcely branched and but slightly winged, the bases of the leaves being hardly at all continued down the stem. tuberosum, found in wet places from North Wales, Stafford and Lincoln northwards into Scotland, and most common in the south of Scotland, though absent from Ireland. The botanist Sibthorpe makes a definite species of it under the name patens. The creamy yellow-flowered form is stated by Hooker to be Symphytum officinale proper, and the purple flowered he considered a variety and named it S. Comfrey is in bloom throughout the greater part of the summer, the first flowers opening at the end of April or early May. The fruit consists of four shining nutlets, perforated at the base, and adhering to the receptacle by their base. The corollas are bell-shaped, the calyx deeply five-cleft, narrow to lance-shaped, spreading, more downy in the purpleflowered type. These racemes of flowers are given off in pairs, and are what is known as scorpoid in form, the curve they always assume suggesting, as the word implies, the curve of a scorpion's tail, the flowers being all placed on one side of the stem, gradually tapering from the fully-expanded blossom to the final and almost imperceptible bud at the extremity of the curve, as in the Forget-meNot. They decrease in size the higher they grow up the stem, which is much branched above and terminated by one-sided clusters of drooping flowers, either creamy yellow, or purple, growing on short stalks. a portion of them runs down the stem, the body of the leaf being continued beyond its base and point of attachment with the stem. The lower, radical leaves are very large, up to 10 inches long, ovate in shape and covered with rough hairs which promote itching when touched. Description-The leafy stem, 2 to 3 feet high, is stout, angular and hollow, broadly winged at the top and covered with bristly hairs. There is a branched rootstock, the roots are fibrous and fleshy spindle-shaped, an inch or less in diameter and up to a foot long, smooth, blackish externally, and internally white, fleshy and juicy. The plant is erect in habit and rough and hairy all over. This well-known showy plant is a member of the Borage and Forget-me-not tribe, Boraginaceae. Habitat-A native of Europe and temperate Asia is common throughout England on the banks of rivers and ditches, and in watery places generally.
Both flourish in bright sunlight but appreciate a bit of shade where the afternoon sun gets intense. Comfrey and borage enjoy similar growing conditions.
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