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.
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Corn-Honewort
Description. This rises from a long thick white root; the stalks are numerous, round, fleshy, and a foot and a half high: they are of a pale and somewhat blueish green. The leaves grow at equal distances; they usually hang drooping; they are large, finely cut at the edges, and pointed; and they are sometimes spotted with white: their colour is a blueish green. The flowers are small and inconsiderable, and, like the leaves of the plant, hang down: they are yellow in the upper part, and purple at the base, though some are found in our corn-fields quite white.
Place. It grows frequently in corn-fields, but is also found in thick hedges, and shady or moist situations.
Time. It flowers in July.
Government and virtues. It is a flower of the Sun: a great vulnerary. The flower contains a deal of honey-juice; they are cooling and moistening, good for inflammations of the liver, St. Anthony's fire, redness and pimples in the face, being applied to the parts affected as a cataplasm, or cloths dipped in the juice, laid on, and now and then shifted; made into a poultice with hogs-lard, it helps hot swellings and tumours.