Hampshire Watercress - a reet peppery read

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Poor Victorians may sometimes have snaffled healthier fare than we do, a typical breakfast for a 19th-century London slum-dweller comprising stone-ground bread steeped in dripping �" lots of healthy monounsaturated fats there �" and a large bunch of watercress, bursting with highly nutritious minerals and vitamins. Plain and simple. Nothing processed. No sugar. No plastic wrapping.

Said humble salad leaf with a peppery tang thrives to this day in the cool, mineral-rich chalk streams meandering through the South Downs of Hampshire and Dorset, where it has provided the locals with many a free meal in times of need for hundreds of years.

Famed for its health-giving properties, it enjoyed heroic status during Victorian times as a super-food, being a reputed cure-all which could reverse baldness, dispel lethargy, cure scurvy and make freckles vanish �" pfff, just like that! Green magic. Hyperbole apart, it is certainly nutritious, of that you may be in no doubt. And peppery.

The first farm dedicated to watercress got growing in 1808. But things really took off for Nasturtium officinale in 1865 during the golden age of railways with the arrival of what was to become the ‘Watercress Line’ at Alresford in the very heart of the Hampshire watercressery. Tonnes of the green goodness could be at Covent Garden and on the streets of London in no time at all, day in day out. And on the streets of Liverpool, still dripping and fresh, in seven hours.

A happy accident no doubt, but even the elegant livery of the steam locomotives that thundered to London with tonnes of Hampshire’s finest leaf was, yes, you’ve guessed it, a soothing shade of watercress green. Perfectly fitting really.

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Of course, there are far fewer family run watercress farms now than in Victorian times, far fewer growing beds and far fewer people employed in tending them. But watercress is most certainly still grown with loving devotion in Hampshire, and still has a loyal following among those who appreciate a truly tasty health food.

Indeed, talk is not now not about making freckles vanish �" why would you want to anyway? No, the focus now is on the standing of watercress as a regal member of the cruciferous family of vegetables, which includes such nutritional royalty as crown prince kale and archduke broccoli.

It’s all about countering the deleterious effects of inflammation in the human body, and with it the incidence of premature mortality brought on �" in men and women �" by various cancers.

A compound called sulforaphane adds a touch of bitterness to cruciferous vegetables and, crucially, is thought to inhibit the activity of a critical enzyme in cancer cells, slowing the disease in its tracks.

Furthermore, a want of calcium, magnesium and potassium in one’s diet may lead to elevated blood pressure. Said three benign chemicals allegedly release sodium in the body, which it turn helps to dilate the arteries and �" healthy sigh �" lower one’s blood pressure.

Yes, watercress is packed with calcium, magnesium and potassium, possibly because it grows in water which has taken hundreds of years to percolate through the chalky aquafers before emerging in natural springs, laden with nature’s finest nutrients.

The story just gets better and better. How’s your vitamin K intake? Not good? Watch out those brittle bones of yours don’t start fracturing on you, especially but not exclusively in later years. Yes, you guessed it, watercress will help you to improve matters no end. It’s the calcium, in it.

Diabetes a worry? Watercress contains the magical antioxidant alpha-lipoic acid. Said ingredient helps to lower glucose, boost insulin sensitivity and prevent oxidative stress-induced changes in diabetes sufferers.

As always, naturally, balance is all, naturally. You can’t live on watercress alone of course. That would be madness, as is any obsession with a single food source. But the balance sheet of benefits clearly places watercress right up there with other green aristocrats of the vegetable kingdom.

A NEW LIFE

Instinctively, when Rhiannon Smith decides it’s time she and her two lovers, Matt and Jamie leave London for a healthier way of life, she resolves that with a little luck and determination buying Nightingale Wood Farm, a derelict watercress holding in Hampshire is one dream she just has to grasp with both hands. What’s not to like about watercress, she reasons?

But is there any money in it? Jamie wants to know, before throwing up his job to chase Rhi’s dream. No there isn’t, not real money, not in the basic back-breaking business of raising and selling the green stuff. But there’s more to watercress than dripping bundles of Hampshire’s finest vegetable matter. There’s the lifestyle, the wellbeing, the vision that such a super-food inspires in those with the soul to be inspired �" a quality far from common in the highly processed lives many now lead, stuffed full of additives, sedatives and purgatives.

And there’s the setting �" the natural rolling beauty that is the Hampshire countryside, Jane Austen country for goodness sake. Where better to set up a working farm resort where stressed millennials may rebalance their chakras doing a little open air yoga, with real life nightingales serenading their stretchings beneath the speed-you-well skies of house-martin England?

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Rhi is right, and lucky, and a worker, in equal measure. She makes things happen, whips and whispers her vision into a beating-heart reality, fixes things, opens doors, for herself and in the lives of those around her. She’s a compelling, if sometimes annoying, force of nature, with a feel for nature, who works with nature, never against it.

The three of them dredge the silted cress beds, pull up overgrown willows, restore the hydrology of the neglected farm, learning as they go, about themselves and how to do things and how to achieve things they thought beyond them.

All because of Rhi’s dream. And a magical little aquatic vegetable stuffed with life-enhancing nutrients. So, yes, Rhiannon Smith, what indeed is not to like about watercress?

If you stooge around on the Internet for a while, you will see that Hippocrates reputedly located a hospital close to a fast-flowing stream in order to have a supply of medicinal watercress to hand, a story for which there is no proof whatsoever. That said, it sounds like a wise thing to do, the sort of thing we would like to think Hippocrates would certainly have done. So who actually cares whether it is actually authentic or not? After all, surely any story, old or new, true of false, fact or fiction, any story containing a sparkling stream of spring water, and a bed of waving green aquatic goodness running through its DNA must surely be equally efficacious to body and soul.

Rhiannon Smith would certainly agree with you on this point, forever and a day.

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