Elegant plant dating from Roman times
Agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria, Cocklebur or Church Steeples) is a herbaceous perennial of the Rosaceae family, growing to about one metre in dry ditches and hedges in Europe and Africa. An elegant plant, it has pinnate hairy leaves on an unbranched stem that terminates in racemes of bright yellow, star-shaped flowers that produce the burrs that attach to passing animals.
The generic name is believed to derive from the Greek agremone, a word given to plants that could supposedly cure cataracts and the specific name from the scholar king, Mithradates Eupator, King of Pontus, who resisted the Roman advances into Asia Minor and who compiled a tract of herbal cures for wounds suffered in warfare.
Pliny referred to the plant as ‘a herb of princely authority’ and Dioscorides recommended agrimony ‘for such that are bitten by serpents’. It seems to have acquired this reputation as a cure for venomous bites in many cultures – the Anglo Saxons applied the herb to warts, wounds and snake-bites. There is an Old English poem which goes as follows:
If it be leyd under mann’s heed,
He shall sleepen as he were deed;
He shall never drede ne wakyn
Till fro under his heed it be takyn.
There is a strange cure for internal bleeding, popular in mediaeval times, that required agrimony to be mixed with toad skin and menstrual blood, obviously a treatment of last resort. Gerrard suggests that ‘A decoction of leaves is good for them that have the naughty liver’, and the plant was an essential ingredient of ‘Arquebusade Water,’ which was applied to wounds caused by early firearms.
The herb contains tannins, coumarins, flavanoids and phytosterols as well as vitamins B and K, which makes it diuretic, hepatic, astringent, haemostatic, vulnery and cholaguogic. It also promotes the assimilation of food. Modern herbalists recommend agrimony for acid stomach, indigestion, debility of the liver, gall bladder stimulation and disorders, nose-bleed, incontinence, infantile bed-wetting, diarrhoea and promotion of the gastric juices.
Externally, it is applied to clean and heal difficult ulcers and to remedy suppurating wounds and sores.
Recent research indicates that extracts from the plant will inhibit selected viruses and the tuberculosis bacterium. Chinese scientists have isolated a compound from Agrimonia pilosa that is a powerful blood coagulant and will inhibit bone, liver and pancreatic cancers.
The honey-scented flowers were once added to mead and the whole plant yields a yellow dye, which deepens in hue as the season progresses.
Next week colt’s-foot
