With short sharp hooked spines along the edges of its stems and leaves, Wild madder (Rubia peregrina) is one vicious-looking plant. You wouldn’t want to fall into a patch of it or mistakenly grab a stem for support if you lost your footing on one of the rocky slopes it likes to scramble over. Fortunately, my local plant was confined behind a metal fence though, even there, it was almost smothering the other scrub and was reaching its nasty tendrils through the railings as if to grab its next potential victim.

This is a coastal plant, found mainly in the south and west of Britain so along England’s southern coastline, right around the Welsh coast, and around Ireland’s southern coastline. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey writes that Wild madder is related ‘to the dye plant, madder, R. tinctorum, and its roots have been used to give a pink tone by English dyers’.