|
This optimism has led to some very old fallacies, and the
literature of herb gardening is crammed with irrelevant plants
once thought to be useful. Even some modern herb books are
quite brazenly padded with species long since discredited-
holdovers from the days when fearsome potions were brewed
from herbs, insects, snakes, and other horrors, upon the theory
that such foul concoctions were good for everything from the
King's evil to stunting the growth of puppies. Some of these
plants have come down to us, not because they yield remedies
that are any good, but because around them has grown such a
vintage of folklore that scarcely any "old-fashioned garden"
would be entitled to the name without them. A few of these
are included here, although they have no present medical use,
nor are they particularly fragrant, and are of little or no use
as culinary herbs. Their inclusion is our last gesture to the
past, for really useful herbs are as modern as science.
Historically herbs were grown only for three qualities-
fragrance, medicine, or for what they added to cookery. The
fragrant-leaved herbs we still treasure, and nearly all the rest
of the plants in this book are used in various recipes, but the
medicinal herbs require a bit of sifting.
From the Greeks to the Middle Ages there was a vast literature on so-called medicinal plants. Hundreds of different sorts
were grown, but scarcely a handful are admitted to the U. S.
Pharmacopoeia or the National Formulary, which are the
official repositories of the really useful medicinal plants of
today. Growing poppy for morphine, foxglove for digitalis,
cinchona for quinine, or monkshood for aconite, all highly
important drugs, are specialized operations outside the scope
of this book and generally beyond the knowledge of the
amateur. Some simples and home-made tonics and teas everyone can make from herbs grown in any garden. But a simple,
as the word implies, is scarcely a technical remedy, and we
grow them today largely because gardeners seem loath to
give up the traditions of the past when these storied herbs lined
the borders of many old monasteries, the courts of the Sacacens,
and the gentle knot gardens of Elizabethan England.
A few of the herbs grown for two thousand years as containing "remedies" were ultimately found to have some
scientific basis, and this has sometimes led to their indis
criminate culture. It should never be forgotten that growing
herbs as a commercial source of drugs is extremely risky, for
two excellent reasons. The amateur may be able to raise the
herbs with apparent success only to find that the essential
ingredient is so sparse as not to be worth extracting.
|
