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Preface

So many people for so many years have been collecting and reporting the

herbal remedies used by country folk that it must seem surprising that the

resulting mass of data has not been brought together long since and surveyed

overall. Certainly, it seemed surprising to the two of us, as interlopers from

the world of botany. For more than a century and a half, records of where in

Britain and Ireland each species of wild plant is known to occur (or have

occurred) have been sedulously logged and published. So well established is

this tradition that the regular disciplined effort that sustains it has come to be

taken for granted. Unfortunately, the study of folklore failed to attract indi-

viduals with the necessary time and inclination to perform a similar service

for records of plant use, and the magnitude of that task has increased with the

passage of time.

The problem is not so much the quantity of the information that exists as

its scattered nature. Much of it is in rare, privately published, often ephemeral

printed sources, many of them concerned only peripherally with folk medi-

cine. There are hardly any libraries that combine the necessary open access to

their shelves with a sufficiently representative collection of seemingly relevant

titles to allow research to be concentrated in just a single place. Worse,

though, there is even more material remaining unpublished than has found

its way into print, and extracting that in repositories that happen to be distant

can be costly in time and money, especially when repeated visits are required.

Doubtful plant identifications and obscure or vaguely described ailments, to

say nothing of the Celtic languages, are further difficulties that may have to be

wrestled with even after a productive source has been located.

Fortunately, the full arduousness of the undertaking that has culminated

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