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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Wild Parsnep
Description. The wild parsnep differs little from the garden, but grows not so fair and large, nor has so many leaves, and the root is shorter, more woody, and not so fit to be eaten, and therefore more medicinal. Place. It grows wild in divers places, as in the marshes by Rochester, and elsewhere.
Time. It flowers in July, the seed being ripe about the beginning of August, the second year after the sowing; for after they do flower the first year, the country people call them madneps.
Government and virtues. It is under Venus. The wild parsnep has a cutting, attenuating, cleansing, and opening quality therein. It resists and helps the biting of serpents, eases the pains and stitches in the sides, and dissolves wind both in the stomach and bowels, which is the cholic; and provokes urine. The root is often used, but the seed much more. The wild being better than the tame, shews dame nature to be the best physician. The roots, when cultivated, are sweeter than those of carrots, and are highly nutricious. In the north of Ireland they are brewed with hops, in the same manner that we brew malt, and the liquor thus obtained, after undergoing a fermentation with yeast, proves very agreeable.