240 Mentha pulegium
vesters in the fields and also used by sailors to sweeten their drinking water
when at sea.^260 Beyond this south-western headquarters its recorded use for
these particular purposes has extended to Wiltshire,^261 We x f o r d^262 and (in an
infusion with bramble roots) the Highlands.^263 In Gloucestershire^264 also it
has been drunk to cure flatulence, and in Wales, as coludd-lys,to open the
bowels.^265
Miscellaneous uses, unrelated to any of the foregoing, have been for
cramp in Devon^266 and, mixed with barley-meal, as a dressing on burns in the
Isle of Man.^267 The sole Irish one is as a corn cure in Wexford.^268
Though now a scarce plant, only in the New Forest to be found in quan-
tity still, pennyroyal was allegedly once much more plentiful in lowland Eng-
land. Requiring short turf, it was characteristic of village greens and ponds
frequented by farm geese, both habitats much exposed to modern changes. A
marked association of the older records with the wide verges of old roads
that may have been ancient trackways has been noted.
Salvia verbenaca Linnaeus
S. horminoides Pourret
wild clary
southern and western Europe, Algeria; introduced into North
America, Australasia
The seeds of some Salvia species have a seed coat which, when soaked in
water or melted by the warmth and moisture of the eyeball, becomes jelly-like
and adheres to any foreign body, enabling it to be extracted with the mini-
mum of pain. ‘Clary’ is allegedly a corruption of ‘clear-eye’.
Though other foreign or cultivated species were normally recommended
in official medicine for this purpose, the native English Salvia verbenaca
attracted some use for it as well, under the name ‘eyeseed’. There are definite
records of that from Oxfordshire and Denbighshire^269 and a more doubtful
one from Lincolnshire^270 ; it also seems more likely than gromwell (as
claimed^271 ) to be the ‘eyeseed’ used in Essex, in precisely the same way.
An infusion of the plant formerly drunk as a tea in Berwickshire has pro-
voked the suggestion that it was anciently grown there (and elsewhere?) med-
icinally.^272 Ifso, perhaps that was for sprains, for which a plant known as
‘eyeseeds’ and queried as this species, was at one time used in the Louth dis-
trict of Lincolnshire.^273