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From a distance, with a little imagination, they look like a prickle of porcupines. Closer, they are spiky clumps of soft-rush Juncus effusus: prolific seed-setters, invaders with relentlessly spreading rhizomes, which seem to creep further across this pasture with every passing year. A native plant revelling in our new climate, after another mild, wet winter tips the struggle for domination of waterlogged grazing land even further in its favour.

Superficially, this is one of the least charismatic members of our native flora, with its bundles of long, olive green, quill-like leaves, but splitting these open reveals hidden beauty. Inside lies pith packed with tiny silver star-shaped cells, with their rays joined at their tips, forming a three-dimensional lattice: Stellate parenchyma in botanical parlance.

Two hundred years ago, before electric light at the flick of a switch, soft-rush pith brought a glimmer of light to the long hours of winter darkness. Illumination after dusk came from a fire in the grate, oil lamps, or candles if you could afford them. From 1709 until 1830, successive governments imposed an ever-increasing tax on candles, which could only be legally bought from authorised dealers. So, the rural poor resorted to rushlights.

Soft-rush pith, spongy and absorbent, encased in successive layers of animal fat, provided wicks for rushlights that sputtered for about 20 minutes with a smoky, smelly flame, producing roughly the same amount of light as a modern-day safety match. Twice as much if you “burned the candle at both ends”.

Making them was a task for “decayed labourers, women, and children”, noted the naturalist Gilbert White in The Natural History of Selborne (1789), calculating that 1,600 stripped rush piths would provide wicks to light 800 hours of winter darkness.

Picking a rush leaf, I tried to follow the instructions for preparing rushlights published by William Cobbett, champion of the rural poor, campaigner for abolition of candle tax, “bred and brought up mostly by rush-light”, in his Cottage Economy, published in 1823. “Take off all the green skin,” he wrote, “except of about a fifth part of the way around … necessary to hold the pith together.

Abject failure; the task needs nimbler fingers and sharper nails than mine.

• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com