Figwort - A Pretty Pile.

A bright, beautiful, sunny Sunday is just what the we needed in this chillier than usual March. The latter being the price of a mild winter I suspect. The lesser celendines above were even more appreciative, as was the beautiful female B. hypnorum, who was enjoying both. Does my bum look big in this?

As with all of our common plants and flowers, the lesser celendine (ranuculus ficaria), has a fascinating history. In William Turner's, The Name of Herbes (1548), it was known as fygwurt. Fig being an old word for piles. Sixteenth-century physicians called piles ficus and this lovely harbinger of spring was used to treat those afflicted; pilewort and figwort naturally became alternative names for this little plant. If you could afford it, the roots were boiled in wine. Pity those less fortunate who had to use their own urine instead. Equally unpleasant, in Guernsey they boiled fresh lard and strained it through celendine flowers. Culpeper says that the virtue of a herb may be known by its signature, as plainly appears in this; for if you dig up the root of it, you shall perceive the perfect image of the disease which they commonly call the piles. He was correct in this instance as the herb was re-introduced into the British Pharmacopoeia as a specific haemorrhoid treatment.

The root tubers also resemble cow's udders and as the yellow, shiny petals were the colour of butter, the flowers were hung in cow sheds to improve the milk yield. This only worked however, if the plant was collected at the right time and in the right place with the right spell:

I will pluck the figwort

With the fullness of the sea and land

At the flow of the tide and not the ebb

Before the advent of toothpaste, a lesser known benefit was that the collected petals, rubbed on the teeth was cleansing . How our ancestors must laugh at our folly and obsession with beauty, wasting our money on whitening our teeth. Retaining a decent set must have been enough of a bonus for them.

A note of caution. All parts of the plant contain toxins, which could be an allergen to some. There is one fatal case reported in Britain involving a child.

So to this utterly delightful book I found the other day called Flowers of the Field by Rev C A Johns (1902). It was obviously the very loved companion of a local person, as they have many handwritten notes in the margins. We know that around 100 years ago figwort was growing wild at Bawdeswell Hall. It is possible that the ghost image above is the plant taken from that very location, I wonder what happened to the presserved flower?

You can now spend several of your hard-earned pounds on a bronze leafed cultivated variety but I'm a Norfolk lass and nature knows best in canary yellow and green.

Have a magical week and enjoy the beautiful sunshine.

With love, Annie x

© Norfolk Psychics 2016

Bibliography

Freethy Ron: From Agar to Zenry (Crowood, 1985)

Jordan Michael: A Guide to Wild Plants (Millington Books Ltd, 1976)

Vickery Roy: Garlands, Conkers and Mother-Die (Continium, 2010)

#plants #flowers #celendine #figwort #folklore #herbs #remedy