Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Blue Simson
Description. The flowers of this plant stand separate, one above another, alternately; they grow in a cylindric cup, with awl-shaped scales, placed erect, and the rays are narrow. The leaves are of a dull dead green, and grow upon a ruddy, firm, dry, stalk. The flowers are of a purplish blue, and never spread wide open, but the rays always stand upright. Place. This is a perennial: native of our high dry grounds; a strange plant that appears twice a year, and wears two different faces. Time. In April we see it weak, lying on the ground, and scarce six inches high; in August and September it flowers a second time, and is then robust, upright, about ten inches high, and carries larger flowers. Government and virtues. Mars governs this plant, It is a sharp acid plant. Some administer it for disorders of the breast, where the complaint arises from a tough phlegm. Yet it is one of those things that should be cautiously tampered with.