Ireland has experience of that use, too, in the neighbouring counties of
Limerick^28 and Clare,^29 but the plant has been further valued there in (uniden-
tified) parts as a cure for rickets^30 (presumably because of its reputation for
healing bone troubles) and in Galway for easing rheumatism and sciatica.^31
But despite an assertion by the leading mid-Victorian authority on ferns
that it ‘is much used as a rustic vulnerary’,^32 no localised folk records of its
application to bleeding have been uncovered.
ADIANTACEAE
Adiantum capillus-veneris Linnaeus
maidenhair fern
almost worldwide in tropical and temperate zones
The only convincing evidence that Adiantum capillus-veneris has truly been
a folk herb in Britain or Ireland comes from the latter’s remote Aran Islands,
where it is sufficiently frequent in the wild for its dried fronds to have been
used to make a tea.^33 Elsewhere, though, this fern is surely too scarce for wild
populations of it to have been credibly drawn on medicinally, at least in
recent centuries. The vernacular name is shared by several other, more com-
mon plants, especially the somewhat similar spleenwort Asplenium tri-
chomanes,which those enthused by the praise heaped on ‘maidenhair’ by the
herbals and by physicians presumably used instead.
POLYPODIACEAE
Polypodium vulgare Linnaeus, in the broad sense
polypody
northern temperate zone, South Africa
Polypodium vulgareis one of a number of herbs whose uses have magico-
religious overtones. In early eighteenth-century Ireland a careful distinction
was made between the epiphytic‘polypody of the oak’ and the supposedly dif-
ferent kind to be found so commonly there on walls, the former rated so much
the more effective that, given the scarcity of Irish woodland by then, it was
having to be imported.^34 More than a century later the belief still lingered there
in the Aran Islands that the rhizomes had to be pulled at the time of the new
moon and buried in porridge overnight before being potent medicinally.^35
It is from Ireland that most of the few folk records come, doubtless in
reflection of the plant’s greater profusion there overall. Those records, as also
in Britain, are for very diverse uses, and the ailments treated seem largely
58 Osmunda regalis