originally posted: March 25, 2003 | by chelsie

Lavender was a familiar plant in English gardens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper (The Compleat Herbal) went so far as to write, "Being an inhabitant almost in every garden, it is so well known, that it needs no description." Fifty-six years earlier, John Gerard had described three "Lavander Spikes" and three "French Lavanders" or "Stickeadoves" in The Herbal. [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: March 18, 2003 | by chelsie

In his chapter, Of the Willow Tree, John Gerard (1597) uses withy and willow interchangeably. Technically, withes (plural of withy) were strong and flexible willow branches used for weaving baskets, furniture, and barriers like fences. Withy came to refer to any of the willows (genus: Salix). [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: March 11, 2003 | by chelsie

Cloves are the dried, unopened flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum (L.) Merrill & LM Perry. The flower buds have been part of the spice trade for thousands of years, originally caravanned across Asia from their homeland in the Molucca Islands. [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: March 4, 2003 | by chelsie

Autumn, 1263. The Vikings tenuously ruled the islands off the Scottish coast. King Haakon IV had a fleet of Viking longboats off the coast of Largs. No one is certain whether Haakon the Elder intended simply a show of power by raiding villages or a full scale invasion of Scotland. The power was with the sea; a tremendous storm drove many of his longboats ashore. [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: February 25, 2003 | by chelsie

There are numerous fruits loosely called gourds, but one, the hard-shelled bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standley) became a worldwide crop thousands of years before European exploration. It is generally accepted that its home was tropical Africa. (The Garden of Gourds, L.H. Bailey, 1958) [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: February 18, 2003 | by chelsie

The Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia Swingle) is a vigorous, thorny shrub/tree growing from 2 to 4 meters (6 to 13 feet). Planted in frost-free areas, limes mostly take care of themselves. This lime was well-known in the Levant (eastern Mediterranean) having arrived there by the Arabic caravans of the first "Silk Road" trade routes before the fall of the Roman Empire. It remained unknown to Europeans until the Crusades (1095-1270 CE). [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: February 11, 2003 | by chelsie

The ancient Mesopotamians, Jews, Greeks, and Romans knew of citrus in the form of the citron (Citrus medica Linnaeus). Theophrastus wrote of the citron in the third century BCE as common in Media, now northwestern Iran. Arab traders brought lemons (Citrus X limon (L.) Osbeck) and sour oranges (Citrus X aurantium Linnaeus) from eastern Asia and spread the trees throughout the Mediterranean from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: February 4, 2003 | by chelsie

The Jacobites were Scottish and English supporters of the Stuarts, particularly the exiled King James VII, the last Roman Catholic ruler of England. In the late 1600s, England, Scotland, and Ireland were in political and social unrest. Catholics, Protestants, and Presbyterians vied for power. The three religious factions were further divided by numerous political alliances. The rebellion lasted for 60 years. [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: January 28, 2003 | by chelsie

Timoleon and Timophanes were brothers and citizens of Corinth. Timoleon [ti mol' ee on] served in the infantry and Timophanes [ti mof' a nees] in the cavalry. During one battle, Timophanes' horse was injured and Timophanes lay on the ground. Timoleon ran to his brother's aid, shielding him until the two could be rescued from the fighting. [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: January 21, 2003 | by chelsie

In Pliny's twenty-fifth volume, The Nature of Wild Plants, he wrote, "Hemlock is poisonous and has a bad reputation because the Athenian state employed it for inflicting capital punishment. Persons who have drunk hemlock begin to grow cold at their extremities." (John F. Healy translation, 1991) The most famous case happened almost five hundred years before Pliny wrote Natural History (first century CE). It was the death of Socrates.  [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: January 14, 2003 | by chelsie

The grasspea (Lathyrus sativus Linnaeus) is a drought tolerant legume thought native to North Africa. It is widely grown in rain-poor regions with marginal soils. Grasspea has a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and improves soil for other crops. The plants are generally raised as forage.  [Click here to read more...]

originally posted: January 7, 2003 | by chelsie

As ipecac (Cephaelis ipecacuanha (Brotero) A. Richard) became increasingly used in Eurasia and North America to treat dysentery, other plants were substituted for the treatments and more emetic plants were discovered. A specimen sent to Linnaeus's son by José Celestino Mutis in 1764 was accepted without question as the true ipecacuanha. The specimen was not ipecac, but another species known to cause emesis and not effective against dysentery.  [Click here to read more...]