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LINUM is the Latin name for Flax. No wonder, therefore, that the two products coming from it are called LINEN and LINSEED. Linen is made from the fibres and linseed, as the name suggests, from the seed of its blue flower.
Gradually, the raucus yellow of oil-seed rape, which has infested our fields in recent years, is giving way to the blue sheen of linseed. E.E.C. subsidies, reduced on rape but increased on linseed, are largely responsible.
LINUM was grown for centuries in this area for the linen trade, to which the Alcester street name, Bleachfield Street, bears witness. Whether linseed oil was harvested as well in those early days is uncertain but improbable. The surviving manor rolls for parishes in this locality often reprimand citizens for polluting local rivers by washing (retting) flax, thus softening the fibres. The seed of the plant is never mentioned.
Linseed oil today is used in foodstuffs and in the manufacture of linoleum (which is making a comeback). Many modern cricket bats do not need this oil, whose smell, mingled with that of new-mown grass, used to presage for cricketers the start of a new season.
During June the blue flowers of the flax plant tinted new fields in the South and Midlands: many must have wondered what they were seeing from their car windows. It was LINSEED.
© G.E. Saville 1992