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In the good old days when
ignorance was a necessity, superstition a virtue, and belief in
magic was universal, there were literally hundreds of perennial
herbs cultivated for fantastic reasons. Science has exploded
many of these ancient fallacies, adopted and modified a few,
and given us today the modern Pharmacopoeia. In it, and in
one or two basic texts like the National Formulary and United
States Dispensatory, are listed all medicinal plants with an
accurate appraisal of their medical worth.
It has taken several hundred years to reach this degree of
competence in the field of medicinal plants. An ocean of non-sense has been drained off the mass of knowledge which these
investigators have left to a world eager to know what nature
has provided for illness and how we extract it. Scarcely any
other scientific achievement has meant so much to medical
science, for from it has come such specifics as digitalis,
scopolamine, quinine, atropine, morphine, and aconite, to
mention only some of the more important.
It would be nice to be able to record a similar competence
among the herb gardeners. Unhappily they have clung to
every rumor of fancied use and persisted in the cultivation of
useless weeds centuries after the advocates of their imaginary
virtues have been proved completely wrong. Such all-inclusive
gullibility, merely for the sake of growing some plant known to
be in cultivation at Tours or Cologne or Rome hundreds of
years ago, has had one unfortunate effect upon the literature of
herb gardening. Although the medical botanists have purged
their modern books of plant dross, modern herb books are
too often crammed with plants of no medical value and
precious little value in cookery.
The authors of some of these books, having acquired a smattering of the Latin names of plants, think it incumbent to list
all the species of a genus merely because one of them is of
unquestioned value. One of these masterly compilations, open
before me as I write, lists, under the genus Thymus (thyme),
37 species and varieties, of which only a handful have ever
reached this country (most of these being of doubtful value)
and only one of which, the true thyme, with its varieties, has
any meaning to the modern herb gardener.
It is to spare the reader from this avalanche of the superfluous
that there has been a drastic selection of the perennial herbs in
this chapter. Only 40 are listed, and this number, to some of
the more fanatical, may seem very meagre. All strictly
medicinal plants have been excluded, and the aim has been to
include those of culinary value only, except for a few old
garden favorites the cultivation of which has hallowed associations.
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