Stone Crop
Names. Called also Prick-Madam, small Houseleek, and Wall Pepper. Description. It grows with divers trailing branches upon the ground, set with many thick, flat, roundish, whitish green leaves, pointed at the ends. The flowers stand many of them together, somewhat loosely. The roots are small, and run creeping under ground.
Place. It grows upon the stone walls and mud walls, upon the tiles of houses and pent-houses, amongst rubbish, in other gravelly places, and also upon Hyde Park wall.
Time. It flowers in June and July, and the leaves are green all the winter. Government and virtues. It is under the dominion of the moon, cold in quality, and somewhat binding, and therefore very good to stay defluxious, especially such as fall upon the eyes. It stops bleeding, both inward and outward, helps cankers, and all fretting sores and ulcets: it abates the heat of choler, thereby preventing diseases arising from choleric humours. It expels poison much, resists pestilential fevers, and is exceeding good also for tertian agues: you may drink the decoction of it, if you please, for all the foregoing infirmities. It is so harmless an herb, you can scarce use it amiss: being bruised and applied to the place, it helps the king's evil, and any other knots or kernels in the flesh; as also the piles, but it should be used with caution. It is also so very acid that it will raise blisters, if applied externally to the skin. The juice taken inwardly excites vomiting. In scorbutic cases, and quartan agues, it is a most excellent medicine, under proper management. A decoction of it is good for sore months, arising from a scorbutic taint in the constitution. The leaves bruised and applied to the skin, are excellent in paralytic contractions of the limbs.