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Rushy Glonde

Description. This grows from a root composed of many long and thick fibres. The leaves are long, slender, and sharp-pointed; they stand upright, and are of a deep green, and very rough and harsh to the touch; they are rounded on the back, and flat on the upper side, biggest at bottom, and smallest at the extremity. The stalk is slender and green: there are no leaves on it, but at distances single flowers appear, which are four leaved, of a greenish white, and seldom quite open.

Place. It is found at the bottom of fish-ponds in the northern part of England and Wales:

Time. It flowers in August.

Government and virtues. This is a Lunar plant, The flowers are seldom used, but the leaves are put in cooling ointments, being accounted good for burns, inflammations, and hot swellings, and are an ingedient in the Unguentum Populeon.

RYE.

Description. The winter rye, which has the largest grain, is what farmers generally cultivate. In many northern counties rye and wheat are often mixed and sown together.

Place. It is generally sown and thrives best in poor limestone, dry, gravelly, and sandy soils.

Time. It is generally sown in Autumn, and rises in a much shorter time than wheat.

Virtues. Rye is more digesting than wheat; the bread and the leaves of it ripens and breaks imposthumes, boils, and other swellings: the meal of rye put between a double cloth, and moistened with a little vinegar, and heated in a pewter-dish, set over a chafing-dish of coals, and bound fast to the head while it is hot, does much ease the continual pains of the head. Matthiolus says, that the ashes of Rye-straw put into water, and steeped therein a day and a night, and the chops of the hands or feet washed therewith, will heal them.