being drunk when needed.^66 These last two are recorded from the area just
south-west of the border, whereas it has been down south in Limerick^67 that
the plants, known there as the ‘Blessed Virgin’s chalice’, have had one at least
of their local clusters of popularity as a treatment for whooping cough.
Cistaceae
Helianthemum nummularium (Linnaeus) Miller
H. chamaecistus Miller
rock-rose
Europe, south-western Asia
(Name ambiguity) ‘Rock Rose’ features in a list of supposedly wild plants
utilised for folk medicine in Limerick.^68 All the species of the family Cista-
ceae, however, are very rare in Ireland and unknown in that particular county.
Unless one of the garden species was being alluded to, presumably some
member of the genus Rosa was known by that name.
Violaceae
Viola odorata Linnaeus 5
sweet violet
Europe, south-western Asia, North Africa, Macaronesia; introduced
into North America, Australasia
Though at least some of the species in the same section of the genus Viola are
known to share the same properties, ‘violet’ has probably done duty in folk
medicine for all of them indiscriminately—when it has not been intended for
butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris), which was often known, confusingly, as ‘bog
violet’. Sweet violet,V.odorata,seems to have been the one normally singled
out, if only because it was conveniently at hand in cottage gardens, cultivated
for its scent—and once introduced, very difficult to eliminate.
The well-attested power of that scent to induce faintness or giddiness in
people with a particular constitutional susceptibility to it, or when made into
‘violet balls’ to revive them, has probably been well known since very early
times: the use of a decoction of the plant or a compress of it to ease a
headache certainly goes back at least to the Dark Ages in the learned tradition
and may be even older in the folk one, if the fact that its use is on record from
the Highlands^69 is indicative of ancient survival. Against that, though, is the
suspicious lack of any evidence of this elsewhere in Britain other than some
part of the south-western Midlands, where dried flowers have been made
St John’s-worts to Primulas 111