This is the first of a series of posts in which I am republishing a book entitled The Folklore of Herbs by Katherine Oldmeadow. The book was published in 1946. Oldmeadow seems to have been a significant figure in the revival of pagan witchcraft in Britain: she was identified by Philip Heselton as one of the members of the ‘New Forest Coven’ into which Gerald Gardner claimed to have been initiated.

CHAPTER I

THE PHYSIC GARDEN

John Gerard, the old Cheshire herbalist, living in the sixteenth century, said that herbs are such treasures that kings and princes have esteemed them as jewels. He added: “What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants as with a robe of embroidered worke set with orient pearls and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? But these delights are in the outward senses – the principal delight is in the minde singularly enriched with the knowledge of these visible things, setting forth to us the invisible wisdome and admirable workmanship of Almightie God.”

But although kings and princes in the past have esteemed herbs as jewels, quite a number of people in these days have the strange belief that they are dowdy plants, given any odd corner of the kitchen garden to grow in and used occasionally by the cook.

And yet a study of the old herbals will teach us that by “herbs” our forefathers meant not only the green, aromatic plants called pot or perfume herbs, but such lovely flowers as lilies, roses, violets, paeonies, cowslips, primroses, marigolds, jessamine and many others.

The ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped flowers and herbs because of their beauty as well as their healing virtues. They dedicated them to their gods, decorated their altars and crowned their priests with them, and wore wreaths themselves on gala occasions.

Plato, visiting the aged Cephalus, found him sitting upon a cushioned chair with a garland of flowers on his head, “as he happened to have been sacrificing in the court.” The making of wreaths and garlands for these occasions was one of the ancient professions.

In mediaeval times every castle, manor-house and homestead had its own herb garden, and the mistress of the house was learned in herbal lore. She made her own physic and administered it to the sick and melancholy, for there were few apothecary shops in those days and physic never came out of patent-medicine bottles and pill boxes, but grew in the herb garden.

In the book of Ecclesiasticus we read: “The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth, and he that is wise will not abhor them,” and the gypsies, descended from the ancient Egyptian tribes, hold the belief that for every ill we suffer there is a plant growing somewhere to cure it and that patient research will reveal it.

Animals share this faith, for when they are ill they go prowling in field and garden in search of healing grass and herbs.

John Parkinson, another famous herbalist, believed that when God created Adam he gave him a knowledge of all the growing plants in Paradise, and in these plants grew everything needful for man’s happiness and health.

The truth of this belief is experienced by us all sometimes when, tired and depressed, we walk alone in a garden filled with the scent of flowers. The fragrance of the aromatic herbs revives us; the loveliness of the flowers cheers and stimulates our drooping spirits. 

Before the Reformation the monks were great herbalists and all monastery gardens were well stocked with physic herbs. These were supplied to the poor, who came knocking at the monastery gates when ill or in trouble. The monks grew the native plants they knew and many foreign ones, brought home by the Crusaders from Egypt and Syria; healing herbs, which needed careful cultivation.

The monks looked upon herbs as holy because they were given by God to cure our ills, and when they picked them they recited special little prayers:

“Thou art good for manie a sore 

And healest manie a wound: 

In the name of sweet Jesus,

I take thee from the ground.”

The rich people living in the country had large herb gardens of their own and cottagers grew homely simples; and even in large towns, the housewife need not go herbless.

She might not have a herb garden of her own, but outside the town gates were lanes, fields and hedgerows, and even London was encircled by a green belt: in fact, up to the year 1800, Londoners could walk to green pastures in any direction in ten minutes. Drury Lane was called the village of St. Giles; Leicester Fields and Soho were open country and Mile End was a common where pennyroyal grew in abundance.

You could pick a bunch of white bugloss in Piccadilly, and saxifrage grew wild in the Old Kent Road. In Southwark Bridge Road there was once a wonderful garden:

“Where herbs did grow

And flowers sweet,

But now ’tis called

St. George’s Street.”

To these green spaces the good housewife (and sometimes the witch, too, in search of poison for her spells) would sally forth with a large basket to gather her simples; probably happy in the thought that though she had no garden of her own there was an old saying: “Herbs that grow in the fields be better than those that grow in gardens.”

Herbs for physic and herbs for the pot were sold in the streets; and herbalists’ stalls were common in Cheapside, but no self-respecting housewife bought herbs that she could gather herself, for the physicians taught that one handful fresh be worth ten of those bought in Cheapside. The herb woman was a popular character in London streets right down to the eighteenth century.

Long before the watchman’s lantern had grown pale she would appear, trundling the implements of her trade. A wooden table, a large copper urn, a long-handled ladle, a loaf of bread and flat ginger cakes. She would spread her table at some street corner and brew her herb drink, of which “saloop” was the favourite. Her customers were the early workers, who, for the smallest sum, could buy a comforting, wholesome hot drink. The poor little chimney sweep, who had been climbing sooty chimneys since dawn, the soldier off to parade, the water man, the night-watchman, going off duty, all would flock round the table and were probably saved from many a shivery cold through the ministrations of the herb woman.

Street hawkers sold herbs too; fennel, hyssop, lavender, red mint, rosemary, rue, iris leaves for strewing on the floors and sweetening the houses, and for keeping away plague and fevers. Bunches of sweet basil, balm, of ground ivy, which the hawkers called “hedgemaids,” and among the London street cries one would hear: “Buy a barrel of samphire!” or “Buy my groundsel!” For the benefit of city dwellers, also, were planted the first Botanical Gardens, then called “Physic Gardens.”

These were stocked with rare plants from foreign countries, whose virtues and uses could be taught to the people by the herbalist in charge. There were Physic Gardens at Bayswater and Holborn and one in St. James’s Park, where Samuel Pepys first saw oranges growing; but the most famous of all was that planted in Chelsea by the Apothecaries’ Company in 1683.

Later, this garden had the first hot-house in England and was considered a marvellous place.

This interesting old garden, where Linnaeus walked and meditated, is still to be seen; a prim place where herbs are taught to behave themselves; for instead of growing in joyous confusion, which is the natural way of herbs, they stand in tidy rows neatly labelled.

These public gardens were immensely valuable to students of medicine, and apothecaries began to increase.

They set themselves up in shops that looked like magicians’ caves, because they were filled with odd foreign roots; and sometimes a dried alligator or a tortoise would appear as a shop decoration.

They filled large bottles with coloured water which people believed to be magic draughts; and on the shelves and counters were pills, ointments, salves, plasters, cakes of roses and conserves. The apothecary always had a great pestle and mortar for grinding up his medicines and sometimes you would see this in gilt on his sign.

The apothecary shops did well, because in those days people didn’t believe in throwing physic to the dogs, and they were glad to buy their medicines mixed by skilled herbalists instead of going forth to seek herbs in field and hedgerow. Besides, this pleasant task was becoming more difficult for, as the cities spread and grew, the green spaces that encircled them went farther and farther away.

But in remote villages the mistress of the homestead remained sole apothecary to the family and to her poorer neighbours.

In the peace and beauty of her garden she culled healing herbs and taught her daughters and maids the art of simpling.

Her wisdom and knowledge of the virtues of plants was, in those far-off days, the most precious of the country woman’s jewels.