The Book of Herbs, Rosalind Northcote [best books to read for self development TXT] 📗
- Author: Rosalind Northcote
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Fenugreek “hath many leaves, but three alwayes set together on a foot-stalke, almost round at the ends, a little dented about the sides, greene above and grayish underneath; from the joynts with the leaves come forth white flowers, and after them, crooked, flattish long hornes, small pointed, with yellowish cornered seedes within them.” This description is very exact, and, indeed, the conspicuous horn-like pods, singularly large for the size of the plant, are its most marked characteristic. Turner says: “This herbe is called in Greek Keratitis, yt is horned, aigō keros yt is gotes horne, and ŏ onkeros, that is cows horne.” Fenugreek was a Favourite of the “antients,” and Folkard gives an account of a festival held by Antiochus Epiphanus, the Syrian king, of which one feature was a procession, where boys carried golden dishes containing frankincense, myrrh and saffron, and two hundred women, out of golden watering-pots, sprinkled perfume on the assembled guests. All who went to watch the games in the gymnasium were anointed with some perfume from fifteen gold dishes, which held saffron, amaracus, lilies, cinnamon, spikenard, fenugreek, etc. In England it was used for more prosaic purposes, “Galen and others say that they were eaten as Lupines, and the Egyptians and others eate the seedes yet to this day as Pulse or meate.” The herb, he continues, he has never heard of as being used in England, because it was very little grown, but the seed was used in medicine. Gerarde gives us one of its pleasantest preparations as a drug. In old diseases of the chest, without a fever, fat dates are to be boiled with it, with a great quantitie of honey. In 1868 Rhind[40] writes that the seeds are no longer given in medicine, and but rarely used in “fomentations and cataplasms.” Since that date, I should imagine, it is even more rarely used. Fenugreek was at one time prescribed by veterinary surgeons for horses.
[40] “History of the Vegetable Kingdom.”
Good King Henry (Chenopodium Bonus Henricus).This plant is otherwise known as Fat Hen, Shoemaker’s Heels, English Mercury, or as Evelyn says, Blite. He begins with praise: “The Tops may be eaten as Sparagus or sodden in Pottage, and as a very salubrious Esculent. There is both a white and red, much us’d in Spain and Italy”; but he finishes lamely for all his praise: “’tis insipid enough.” Gerarde says: “It is called of the Germans Guter Heinrick, of a certaine good qualitie it hath,” and its name is much the most interesting thing about it. Various writers have tried to attach it to our successive kings of that name, with a want of ingenuousness and ingenuity equally deplorable. Grimm[41] traces it back till he finds that this was one of the many plants appropriated to Heinz or Heinrich—the “household goblin,” who plays tricks on the maids or helps them with their work, and asks no more than a bowl of cream set over-night for his reward—who, in fact, holds much the same place as our Robin Goodfellow holds here.
[41] Teutonic Mythology.
Herb-Patience (Rumex Patienta).That through the dimness of their twilight show
Large dock-leaves, spiral fox-gloves, or the glow
Of the wild cat’s-eyes, or the silvery stems
Of delicate birch trees, in long grass which hems
A little brook.
Calidore—Keats.
Pour le malheur la patience.
La Petite Corbeille.
Proverb.
Herb-Patience was also called Patience-Dock or Monk’s Rhubarb. The French call Water-Dock, Patience d’eau and Parelle des Marais, so the name of the quality that is, in nursery rhyme, a “virtue,” and a “grace,” clings to this dock! Parkinson compares it unfavourably with Bastard Rhubarb, though he says the root is often used in “diet beere”; but Gerarde calls it an “excellent, wholesome pot-herbe,” and relates a tale, in which responsibilities are treated with such delightful airiness that it must be repeated here. He begins by saying that he himself is “no graduate, but a country scholler,” but hopes his “good meaning will be well taken, considering I doe my best, not doubting but some of greater learning will perfect that which I have begun, according to my small skill, especially the ice being broken unto him and the wood rough-hewed to his hands.” Nevertheless, he (who dictates on these matters, to a great extent, through his Herbal) thinks that the learned may gain occasionally from his knowledge. “One John Bennet, a chirurgion, of Maidstone in Kent, a man as slenderly learned as myselfe,” undertook to cure a butcher’s boy of an ague. “He promised him a medicine, and for want of one for the present (he himselfe confessed unto me) he tooke out of his garden three or four leaves of this plant” and administered them in ale, with entire success. “Whose blunt attempt may set an edge upon some sharper wit and greater judgment in the faculties of plants.” Any anticipation that his experiment might lead to disaster does not seem to have troubled him! The root of Patience-Dock “boiled in the water of Carduus Benedictus” was also given at a venture for an ague, and this experiment was tried by “a worshipfull gentlewoman, mistresse Anne Wylbraham, upon divers of her poore Neighbours, with good success.” Mistress Anne Wylbraham must have been a woman of temerity!
Garden-patience used to be a good deal cultivated as spinach, but is now very much ignored, partly because few people know how to cook it. The leaves should be used early in the spring while they are still tender, and the flavour will be very much improved if about a fourth part of common sorrel is added to them. This way of dressing patience-dock was very popular in Sweden, and is described as “forming an excellent spinach dish.” Patience is sometimes spoken of as “passions,” but this name properly belongs to Polygonum Bistorta, the leaves of which were the principal ingredient in a herb-pudding, formerly eaten on Good Friday in the North of England. Parkinson also speaks in this chapter of the “true rhubarb of Rhapontick,” which has “leaves of sad or dark-greene colour... of a fine tart or sourish taste, much more pleasant than the garden or wood sorrell.” Dr Thornton, however, says that Parkinson was mistaken, and that the first seeds of true rhubarb were sent “by the great Boerhaave to our famous gardener, Miller, in 1759”—more than a hundred years later. Very soon after Miller had it, rhubarb was cultivated in many parts of England and in certain localities in Scotland.
A FIELD OF ENGLISH RHUBARB
Horehound (Marrubium vulgare).By biting, never failing.
Muses Elysium.
Polyolbion, Song xiii.
Folkard says that horehound is one of the five plants stated by the Mishna to be the “bitter herbs,” which the Jews were ordered to take for the Feast of the Passover, the other four being coriander, horse-radish, lettuce and nettle. The name Marrubium is supposed to come from the Hebrew Marrob, a bitter juice. De Gubernatis writes that horehound was once regarded as a “contre-poison magique,” but very little is said about it on the whole, and it is an uninteresting plant to look at, and much like many others of the labiate tribe. Long ago the Apothecaries sold “sirop of horehound” for “old coughs” and kindred disorders, and horehound tea and candied horehound are still made to relieve the same troubles. Candied horehound is made by boiling down the fresh leaves and adding sugar to the juice thus extracted, and then again boiling the juice till it has become thick enough to pour into little cases made of paper.
Lady’s-smock (Cardamine pratensis).Our ladye’s smock at our Ladye-tide.
An Early Calendar of English Flowers.
And lady-smocks all silver white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight.
Love’s Labour Lost, v. 2.
Of lady-smocks do rob the neighbouring mead.
Wherewith their looser locks most curiously they braid.
Polyolbion, Song xx.
By which again a course of lady-smocks they lay.
Song xv.
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint, sweet cuckoo flowers,
And the wild march-marigold shines like fire on swamps and hollows gray.
The May Queen.—Tennyson.
“Cuckoo-flower” is a name laid claim to by many flowers, and authorities differ as to which one Shakespeare meant by it. Certainly not the plant under discussion, which is the one we most generally call Cuckoo-flower to-day, for there can be no doubt that this is the “lady’s-smocks” of the line above,—letting alone the fact that the “cuckoo-buds” in the song being of “yellow hue” put the idea out of court. Lord Tennyson’s lines point equally clearly to the Cardamine pratensis. Lady’s-smock is said to be a corruption of “Our Lady’s Smock,” and to be one of the plants dedicated to the Virgin, because it comes into blossom about Ladytide; though as a matter of fact the flower is seldom seen so early. It is remarkable how many attentions this graceful, but humble and scentless flower has received; and besides all the poets Isaac Walton mentions it twice: “Look! down at the bottom of the hill there, in that meadow, chequered with water-lilies and lady-smocks.”[42] And later: “Looking on the hills, I could behold them spotted with wood and groves—looking down in the meadow, could see there a boy gathering lilies and lady’s-smocks, and there, a girl cropping culverkeys and cowslips, all to make garlands suitable to this present month of May.” It is difficult to be positive about culverkeys. Columbines, bluebells, primroses and an orchis have all been called by this name at different times. The primrose is cut out of the question here by its colour, for in the poem which has been quoted a little while before Davors sings of “azure culverkeys.” The columbine is rarely found in a wild state and flowers later in the year, the orchis is hardly “azure,” so on the whole it looks as if the likeliest flower would be the wild hyacinth. To return to the lady’s-smocks, Gerarde says they are of “a blushing, white colour,” and like the “white sweet-john.” In the seventeenth century their titles were various and he gives
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