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.
Hare's Ear
Description. This has a long slender white root; the stalks are numerous, and very small; they are a foot and a half high, and are divided towards the top into a few branches: the leaves stand alternately on them; and they are long, narrow, grassy, and of a pale green. The flowers stand on very small umbels at the top of the stalks, and on footstalks rising from the bottom of the leaves; and they are little and white. The seeds are small and dark coloured. Place. We have it in dry pastures, and by road-sides in Essex, Sussex, and Cambridge.
Time. It flowers in June.
Government and virtues. It is somewhat of the nature of thorough-wax, but in an inferior degree. The juice of this plant is cathartic and diuretic, accounted good to purge phlegmatic watery humours, and service-able against the dropsy and jaundice, and obstruction of the liver and spleen; but it is seldom or never used in England; because a great quantity of fixt salt is drawn from the ashes of this plant, the name of alkali has been given to the fixt salt of all others. The best Venice and Castile soap is made of the lixivium of these ashes.