Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
In addition, 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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Sheep's Sorrel
Description. This sorrel is lower and smaller than the common, having many narrow sharp-pointed leaves, each of which has two large ears growing to the end next the stalk, which make the leaf appear like the head of a bearded spear: they are sour like the common. The flowers grow in spikes as the former, are small and staminous, and the seed triangular, and less than the seed of that. The root is small and creeping in the ground. Place. It grows in dry barren soil.
Time. It flowers in May. It is but rarely used, being supposed to have less virtue than the common sorrel.
Government and virtues. The leaves of all the sorrels are very cooling, allaying thirst, and repressing the bile: are good in fevers, being cordial, and resisting putrefaction. They are of great use against the scurvy, and to that end are commended to be eaten in the spring, in sallads; and the juice is frequently given among the other antiscorbutic juices. The root has no sourness, but a bitter restringent taste, and is accounted serviceable against the scurvy, and bilious fluxes. The seed is also very restringent, and is therefore put into diascordium, and other binding medicines.