There sits a plant in a old rose garden that has tulips. It has huge
leaves and being in an old garden I was expecting it to flower last year
as some sort of flowering plant that I was unfamilar with. It never
flowered last year and so I cut it to the ground. It is up this year and
was watching Garden Line when horseradish was mentioned and it
immediately rung a chord that maybe I have horseradish over there. Why
would anyone plant horseradish into a rose and tulip bed?

But first I need to positively identify whether this is horseradish.
Anyone have a positive I-D method?

On Thu, 01 Jul 2004 02:04:48 -0500, Archimedes Plutonium
wrote:

There sits a plant in a old rose garden that has tulips. It has huge
leaves and being in an old garden I was expecting it to flower last year
as some sort of flowering plant that I was unfamilar with. It never
flowered last year and so I cut it to the ground. It is up this year and
was watching Garden Line when horseradish was mentioned and it
immediately rung a chord that maybe I have horseradish over there. Why
would anyone plant horseradish into a rose and tulip bed?

But first I need to positively identify whether this is horseradish.
Anyone have a positive I-D method?

Horseradish is distinctive, coarse and weedy looking. (Bohemian
horseradish is a little more civilized.) It forms large roots that
will be prominent if you dig one. If you scrape a bit off the root, it
will smell strongly of horseradish. Fresh horseradish is very pungent
and a great improvement over canned, if you like it.

Good pictures on Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages at
http://www-ang.kfunigraz.ac.at/~katz...?Armo_rus.html

Where it is adapted, it can be persistent and invasive, thus
horseradish may well persist in a garden where it was grown years ago.

--
Chris Green