Rumex patientia Seeds | Patience Dock
LATIN NAME: Rumex patientia
COMMON NAME: Patience Dock
Plant Profile
Patience Dock is a robust clumping perennial of southeastern Europe and western Asia, forming a rosette of large, crinkled, lance-shaped leaves up to half a metre long, with flower stems rising to about a metre and a half in early summer. It has been grown as a leaf vegetable since the medieval monastery gardens.
The young leaves are cooked like spinach, tart rather than bitter, and in Romania and the Balkans the plant is still a spring market green. In the garden it is an easy, long-lived perennial of ordinary soil, hardy and unfussy, and it earns its keep precisely in the hungry weeks before spring-sown crops are ready.
Science & Biotechnology
Its species name, patientia, records exactly the quality that made it a garden plant: patience, because it feeds you while you wait for the season. Chemically it is a standard Rumex, with oxalic acid in the leaves, handled by cooking as spinach is, and anthraquinones in the root that give the classic mild purgative effect of the dock roots.
The species has been studied as a leafy crop for its high vitamin C and carotenoid content and for its tolerance of cold, wet soils that defeat spinach. Agronomy trials in eastern Europe have compared it with spinach and chard for early yield, and it has outperformed both in the coldest sites.
Uses & Benefits
Cut the leaves young and often from early spring, and the plant resupplies for weeks; older leaves need longer cooking and more water changes. It is also a fine plant for the ornamental kitchen garden, its big leaves making a bold foliage statement among finer herbs.
Left to flower, it makes a tall, russet seed head that feeds finches and stands decoratively into winter, and it self-sows moderately where the soil is bare. Its young flower stems, cut before they open, are cooked like asparagus in the Balkan tradition, which doubles the harvest from the same plants. Because it takes frost without damage, it is also the green that fills the gap after a late cold snap kills off the spinach.
Growing from Seed
Sow the seed half a centimetre deep in spring, either in pots or direct, and keep it moist; germination takes two to three weeks.
Thin or plant out to forty-five centimetres apart in rich, moisture-retentive soil in full sun or light shade.
Mulch in spring and water in dry weather for the best leaves, and divide or replace the crowns every four or five years when they tire and the leaves grow small. Sow a second batch in midsummer for an autumn crop, since spring-sown plants that bolt can be replaced within ten weeks. Slugs leave the leaves alone once they toughen, but protect the young rosettes in the first spring, which is the only vulnerable window the plant has.
Our Take
The old monks’ spinach: a metre of crinkled, tart leaves from earliest spring onward, asking nothing but rich soil and a knife.
Related Reading
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