Herbology

Anna Pavord

Anna Pavord's books include her bestseller, The Tulip, and most recently Landskipping. In The Naming of Names, also published by Bloomsbury, she considered the search for order in the world of plants, a quest begun by the ancient Greeks and still continuing today. For more than 40 years Anna has lived in Dorset where she gardens on a steep sunny slope among arisaemas and magnolias.

There's a screech as a child trips over a stinging nettle. We search for a dock leaf to wrap around the hot, itchy rash. This is perhaps the last, widely disseminated piece of plant lore that still exists in Britain. Generally, if we need a remedy, we reach for a pill or an expensively packaged potion. Mostly forgotten are the uses, for good or for ill, of all the wild worts that used to be gathered from pastures, riverbanks and woods – barrenwort, birthwort and butterwort (rubbed on cows’ udders both as protection and cure); masterwort, milkwort and mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), revered throughout Europe as a herb both medical and magical. Everyone knew that ‘yf it be within a house there shall no wicked sprite abyde’. It is one of the plants carved into the roof bosses of Exeter cathedral. ‘Wort’ quite often crops up as part of the common name of a British native plant, indicating that it was once used as a kind of medicine

At Hogwarts, Herbology, the study of plants and their uses, quite rightly sits at the centre of the curriculum, one of the seven core subjects that all students must study. Classes are taken by Professor Pomona Sprout. One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by Phyllida Spore is one of the set texts for First Years, duly purchased by new boy Harry Potter at the Flourish and Blotts bookshop in Diagon Alley.

But even Muggles, unable to get hold of this compendious herbal, could learn about plants such as the asphodel, dittany and wormwood, that Hogwarts pupils study. If they were interested in such things, they would be able to field Professor Snape's question about the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane. The answer is that there is none. They are the same plant, known by many different names throughout Europe. To the ancient Greeks, this was akoniton, which grew plentifully in Crete and Zakynthos. The root, pounded when dry, was a deadly and effective poison with few antidotes. The time it took to kill was equal to the time that elapsed since it had been gathered. Writing about it in around AD 77, the Greek doctor Dioscorides reckoned the best remedy for akoniton poisoning was to swallow a mouse whole.

Dioscorides had joined the Roman army as a physician and travelled widely in the Near East. His book De materia medica was a kind of field guide that would help him identify medicinal plants, and give a summary of the complaints and problems that each plant might cure. For the next 1,500 years it was revered as the ultimate authority on plants. But like a game of Chinese whispers, the manuscripts produced in Britain during the Middle Ages drifted further and further from Dioscorides’ brisk, practical original. The Lay of the Nine Healing Herbs was typical of the work produced by these medieval copyists, imbued with magic and Anglo-Saxon superstition about elf-shot (the sudden pain in the side which we call a stitch, they ascribed to malevolent supernaturals) and flying venom: ‘smite four strokes towards the four quarters with an oaken brand, make the brand bloody, throw away and sing this three times’.

Travellers, for instance, were warned it would be foolish to set out on a journey without their mugwort or St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum). Bringing it was not enough – they had to know that this particular wort was effective only when worn under the left armpit. If used in this way, it could be a powerful antidote against second sight, enchantment, witchcraft and the evil eye. Users also had to know when, where and how the herbs had been gathered. Their efficacy depended on the correct rites being observed. Never was this more imperative than when dealing with a mandrake.

There was potent sympathetic medicine in the fanged roots of the mandrake, perceived to have been created in human form. It is a native of northern Italy and Greece, but its dried roots could be found in apothecary shops throughout Europe. Mandrake is a powerful plant – hallucinogenic and widely recommended in early herbals as a painkiller. And an aphrodisiac. It was said to scream as it was pulled from the earth. Medieval manuscripts described the complex rituals involving ivory tools, phases of the Moon and hungry dogs that had to be observed during harvesting. We might see this as a clever protection racket worked by the herb gatherers, but at Hogwarts the young wizards wore earmuffs when handling the mandrakes in the greenhouse.

Inevitably, because it commanded such a high price, fake mandrake began to flood the market. The German botanist Leonhart Fuchs said the roots were often carved from roots of canna. The English herbalist, John Gerard, talked of so-called mandrake that was actually the root of wild bryony fashioned by ‘idle drones that have little or nothing to do but eate and drinke’.

Gerard's Herball, published in 1597, contained details of even more plants than Phyllida Spore's compendium. Though a plagiarist and a crook, he and his book succeeded because the academic carapace that fostered the study of plants on the Continent – botanic gardens attached to universities, scholarly books issued by well-established printers, inspirational teachers, superb illustrations of plants, such as those made by artists working in northern Italy in the 15th century – did not exist in Britain.

Gerard, who grew mandrake in his Holborn garden (unsurprisingly, it was killed by a winter frost), dismissed as ‘ridiculous tales’ the superstitions surrounding it. And yet in his book he included details of the barnacle tree, a miraculous thing that grew on Orkney and bore geese rather than leaves. He even gave it a ‘proper’ Latin name, Britannica concha anatifera. Like other observers at the time, he was trying to explain natural phenomena that were not yet understood. Nobody knew that birds migrated each year. Where then did these magical flocks of geese suddenly come from? In the context of the time, the barnacle tree seemed to provide as good an explanation as any other.

We poor Muggles may never have the chance to be properly initiated into the magical properties of the Bouncing Bulb and the Whomping Willow. Yet some of the old lore lives on. Students at Hogwarts are taught which plants and fungi have the power to protect them from Dark forces. Near where I live, you’ll still occasionally find a branch of our native rowan wedged over the porch of a farmhouse, to protect against witches. Just in case.