Herb Garden

Currently under construction are two new beds for 2023:

The Doctrine of Signatures: Pedanius Dioscorides, who practiced and wrote about medicine in ancient Rome, was one of the first to describe a ‘signature plant’ in the year AD65: “The Herb Scorpius resembles the tail of the Scorpion, and is good against his biting.” Prominent medieval physicians developed the idea, further naming it The Doctrine of Signatures, believing that God included ‘signatures’ in plants during creation to show people the condition or body part that the plant can treat. A good example of this is the spotted leaf of the Lungwort which resembled the look of a diseased lung and so they used the plant to treat respiratory diseases.

Nicholas Culpeper (1616 – 1654): One of the main English herbalists who popularized the use of medicinal plants in Medieval England. A botanist, physician and astrologer, he was educated at Cambridge University, was a man known for his vices as much as for his virtues, had many enemies, smoked plenty of tobacco and drank. Before herbalists such as Culpeper, plants were the domain of paid physicians or village ‘wise women’ who were too often persecuted for alleged witchcraft, but whose knowledge of hedgerow remedies was the only medical recourse available to the rural poor. Much to the disdain of the medical profession, Culpeper published books in English, giving healers who could not read Latin access to medical and pharmaceutical knowledge. One of his best known is ‘The Complete Herbal’ still in print today.