certain habitats, especially fens and wet woods. Even if that view is correct,
however, the plants were probably always too scarce to have constituted a
ready-enough source for medicine, a secondary use of them which would
almost certainly have had to wait until they were grown for food.
While it is strictly speaking irrelevant to the theme of this book to cover
folk medicine from plants in cultivation, there would seem to be a marginal
case for making an exception in this instance. However, apart from a tea made
from the dried leaves of either species used in East Anglia as a weaker alterna-
tive to the (more usual) one made from raspberry leaves for easing labour in
childbirth,^2 it is black currant juice, from the fresh or jellied fruit, for coughs,
colds and chest complaints that monopolises the folk records. That those
recordsarefrom many parts of England but almost wholly from there is
doubtless merely a reflection of the comparative incidence of fruit-growing—
at any rate in the past.
Crassulaceae
Umbilicus rupestris (Salisbury) Dandy
Cotyledon umbilicus-veneris Linnaeus, in part
navelwort, wall pennywort, pennyleaf
southern and south-western Europe, North Africa, Macaronesia
Sempervivum tectorum Linnaeus
house-leek, sengreen
horticultural
It is convenient to considerUmbilicus rupestrisandSempervivum tectorum
together, for the range of ailments to which their fleshy leaves have been
applied is so broadly similar that they must surely have stood in for one
another to no small extent.Umbilicusis rather tightly restricted to the west of
the British Isles, where it is an abundant and unquestioned native.Semper-
vivum,on the other hand, is a sterile cultivar or hybrid of a mountain plant of
central Europe, capable only of vegetative propagation and thus entirely
dependent on deliberate introduction by humans; consequently, in the British
Isles it is confined exclusively to the walls and especially roofs of old buildings,
clinging on as a relic of long-forgotten introductions and for the most part
sufficiently ignored and self-sustaining to be ranked as ‘wild’ by field bota-
nists. A plant with strong magico-religious associations, allegedly sacred to
the sky god and generally said to owe its presence to having been planted on
roofs to protect houses from lightning bolts,Sempervivummay nevertheless
134 Ribes