Originally posted on Frogend dweller's Blog:
Heads of pretty pink elderflower, Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’ There is a fantastic pair of elderflower ‘Black Lace’ bushes, albeit ~ 12 foot tall, growing on either side of the entrance to the Soame greenhouse in the walled garden at Wimpole. I pass them all of the time, but for the past 4…
After the fall of Rome, European medicine was dominated by the Catholic Church, which adopted the pre-Hippocratic Greek belief that illness was a punishment from God and was treatable only by prayer and penance. But Catholic monks preserved Greco-Roman herbalism by copying the ancient texts. Among the monastic orders, the Benedictines were the most avid herbalists. They were the first
Read moreIn 1874, in the Valley of the Tombs near Luxor, the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers discovered the world’s oldest surviving medical text, a 65-foot papyrus dating from shortly after the time of Joseph, around 1500 B.C. The Ebers Papyrus listed 876 herbal formulas from more than 500 plants, including aloe, caraway, cardamom, castor, chamomile, cinnamon, coriander, fennel, fenugreek, garlic, gentian, ginger, juniper,
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