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The Witch’s Herbarium: Botany, Healing & the Old Ways
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items Before herbs came bottled, labeled and neatly arranged on shelves, knowledge of plants was gathered from gardens, fields and forests, then carried into kitchens, apothecaries and generations of tradition. Some plants nourished, some healed, some pois...
Sections
5
Before There Were Potions
The Apothecary
The Poison Garden
Where Folklore Took Root
Back to the Garden
Before There Were Potions
Long before the mysterious bottles and bubbling brews of folklore, there were useful plants growing in gardens. Herbs were cultivated for food, fragrance, dyes, fibers and traditional remedies, then gathered and carried home for use throughout the se...
This opens the question: How did people discover what plants could do? Folk remedies, mythology and eventually science all become part of that story. (affiliate)
KEW: The Apothecary's Garden: The science and mythology of medicinal plants
Every herb garden has to begin somewhere. Seeds carry more than the promise of another harvest; growing familiar herbs is one small way plant knowledge continues from one season and one gardener to the next. (affiliate)
Catalogue of Herbs - Burpee
Now knowledge takes physical form in the garden. Useful plants weren't necessarily scattered randomly; people deliberately brought them together and organized spaces around their uses.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden: A Short History of Herb Garden Design
We've spent centuries accumulating botanical knowledge and still some of us need directions. (affiliate)
Herb Gardening for Dummies
What was once simply practical has become an aesthetic. Lavender, sage, rosemary and thyme have never really left us, but cottagecore has given the old herb garden a decidedly modern revival. Botanical illustrations, useful plants and a little nostal...
Vintage Herb Stamp Shirt - Cottagecore
And then we gather. Before anything reached the apothecary's drawers or bottles, it first had to leave the garden. (affiliate)
Seagrass Basket
The Apothecary
Step inside the apothecary, where the garden harvest was sorted, stored, measured and transformed. Drawers held dried leaves, roots and seeds, bottles lined the shelves, and the mortar and pestle helped turn plant materials into preparations for use....
Before medicines came in familiar bottles and boxes, an apothecary needed a place for an extraordinary assortment of ingredients. With its many small drawers, this old-style chest evokes a shop where dried roots, leaves, seeds and other materials cou...
Vintage 15-drawer Apothecary Chest
Belladonna, foxglove, mandrake—the labeled drawers of this little handmade chest lean deliberately toward the mysterious side of the herbarium. It's a fanciful modern piece, but one that captures the irresistible image of opening an apothecary drawer...
Handmade Blackthorn Herbarium Apothecary Cabinet
Sage and other familiar herbs mingle with bottles, scales and botanical details in what looks almost like an oversized page from an old herbal. A cozy modern interpretation of the illustrations that helped turn plants into something that could be ide...
Herbarium Blanket
Rows of colored bottles have become part of our romantic image of the old apothecary. This faux stained-glass version lets the light shine through that history—with perhaps just enough mystery left in the bottles to let us imagine their contents. ...
Apothecary Bottle Suncatcher
One of the apothecary's most enduring tools is also one we still recognize today. Grinding dried leaves, roots, bark, and other plant materials transformed the harvest once again—this time from something gathered and stored into something prepared fo...
Mortar and Pestle Set
The Poison Garden
Beauty doesn't always mean benign. Knowing plants wasn't simply knowing which herb might be useful; it also meant recognizing what could harm, what could be easily confused, and what required particular care. Among the flowers of the garden are plant...
Beautiful, useful, invasive, intoxicating or deadly, the plant world has never been entirely benign. Wicked Plants opens the darker side of the herbarium with the strange histories and sometimes sinister reputations of plants we might prefer to admir...
Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
Medicine, intoxicant, poison, our relationship with certain plants has never fit neatly into a single category. These vintage botanical illustrations offer a glimpse at species whose uses, risks and reputations have shifted across cultures and throug...
Drug Plants/Poisonous Plants Vintage Botanical Print Set
Among Torre Abbey's historic gardens is the Agatha Christie Potent Plants Garden, where poisonous plants meet one of literature's great mistresses of mystery. Christie knew her poisons well, and here some of the plants behind that fascination step ri...
Torre Abbey Museum - Spirit of Place
Belladonna, mandrake, foxglove, hemlock and other notorious specimens fill these beautifully dark botanical pages. Identified, named and labeled, they feel like pages discovered in the shadowy corner of an old herbarium. (affiliate)
Gothic Garden | Poison Garden Botanical Collection
Poisonous plants aren't merely relics of old herbals and murder mysteries. From the American College of Medical Toxicology, this garden of toxic flowers brings the subject firmly into the present, where plant poisoning remains very real medical toxic...
ACMT Poison Garden Mug
Foxglove looks perfectly at home among the roses and rambling flowers of a traditional cottage garden, yet every part of the plant is toxic. Its beauty, danger and long medicinal history make it a fitting reminder that beautiful doesn't necessarily m...
Foxglove Seeds
Deadly nightshade has carried quite a reputation. Belladonna's story winds through poison, medicine, beauty practices and folklore, making this University of Virginia School of Nursing look at its darker past an intriguing case study in just how comp...
UVA School of Nursing — Flashback Friday: Belladonna's Dark Past
Where Folklore Took Root
Plants gathered stories almost as readily as they gathered names. Around them grew beliefs about healing and protection, magic and misfortune—and eventually many of the symbols we still associate with "the witch." Here, botany begins to mingle with f...
Where better to begin than among the plants themselves? From wise women and herbalists to apothecaries and witches, The Witch's Garden explores plants entwined with traditional medicine, magic and folklore—and the stories that made some of them seem ...
Kew: The Witch's Garden: Plants in Folklore, Magic and Traditional Medicine
An ordinary household broom acquired an extraordinary second life in witch folklore. Add cinnamon—with its own folk associations with protection and prosperity—and this fragrant autumn favorite becomes a fitting meeting place for the practical, botan...
Cinnamon Brooms
Glass spheres have gathered plenty of folklore of their own, including tales of "witch balls" protecting homes by trapping or deflecting harmful influences. I've even come across the charming suggestion that witch ball may once have been understood a...
Garden Gazing Balls & Garden Globes
"Eye of newt" and "toe of frog" have inspired plenty of speculation about old folk names for plants, although the evidence behind many of those interpretations is far from certain. Whatever Shakespeare had in mind, his bubbling brew helped turn stran...
Shakespeare's Macbeth — Witch's Brew Tapestry
Folklore and superstition weren't always harmless stories. Lucy Worsley approaches the witch hunts with her characteristically investigative eye, questioning familiar versions of the past while examining the beliefs, accusations and fears that had ve...
The Witch Hunts - Lucy Worsley Investigates
Cats and black cats in particular have spent centuries tangled up in stories of witches, familiars, and bad luck. After everything folklore has put them through, the least we can do is keep them purring. (affiliate)
Meowijuana Catnip Pawty Mix for Cats
Back to the Garden
After wandering through apothecaries, poison gardens and centuries of folklore, perhaps the best place to end is where we began: among the plants themselves. Observe them, grow them, press them, record them—or simply enjoy them. The herbarium is stil...
After all the remedies, poisons and folklore, it's refreshing simply to look again. These vintage botanical illustrations return our attention to the plants themselves—their leaves, flowers, forms and remarkable variety. (affiliate)
Vintage Medicinal Plant Prints - Botanical Wall Art Set
A herbarium begins with a plant worth observing. Pressing flowers and leaves preserves a small piece of the growing season and invites us to do something generations of plant collectors have done before us: look closely enough to notice the details. ...
Flower Press Kit
Observation becomes knowledge when someone takes the time to record it. Made with banana-tree bark, hibiscus leaves and even a cinnamon-stick accent, this journal seems especially at home beside the herbarium—ready for garden notes, discoveries and w...
Eco-Friendly Leaf-Themed Journal Handmade from Natural Fiber, 'Autumn Memories'
Perhaps there is no better place to close the herbarium than in a living one. The National Herb Garden celebrates herbs in all their remarkable variety and usefulness, preserving not only plants but our continuing interest in growing, studying and un...
National Herb Garden — U.S. National Arboretum