Hiding behind those herbalists’ uses, however, may be some more purely
folk ones. The curious alternative vernacular name which the species bears in
Britain has been explained away as denoting that the plant was sacred to the
god Balder, but in fact it appears to be a euphemism of the books for ‘bawd-
money’, the version which seems to feature invariably in the folklore records.
Could that be hinting at the use as an abortifacient for which ‘Baudminnie’
is said to have enjoyed a reputation in Galloway?^83 Disappointingly, other
early Scottish records, from the Highlands^84 and Aberdeenshire,^85 respec-
tively, are only of the chewing of the roots for flatulence; that the plant bore
the name in the Highlands of ‘micken’,^86 however, may possibly be evidence
that that use is an ancient one there, independent of the lore of the learned.
Conium maculatum Linnaeus
hemlock
Europe, western and central Asia, North and East Africa, Canary
Islands; introduced into North and South America, Australasia
Although most white umbelliferous plants are commonly miscalled ‘hem-
lock’ and in the south of Scotland that name has been applied especially to
wild angelica (Angelica sylvestris) and hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium),
the true plant is sufficiently distinctive by reason of its spotted stems to be
readily recognisable by anyone interested in applying it medicinally. It seems
safe to assume that specialists in herbal treatments, however unlettered, were
normally sure of its identity, whatever the misnomers perpetrated by the
uninformed. However, an extra layer of uncertainty is caused by the greater
prevalence in the west of the British Isles of the even more poisonous Oenan-
the crocata,which though quite different in appearance has ‘hemlock’ in its
vernacular names and has had similar medical applications. The plant
recorded under that name in the Aran Islands as used for poulticing what
was either scrofula or abscesses has been referred to Conium maculatum with-
out question,^87 yet botanists have noted that species there only once and the
record is much more likely to belong to O.crocata,therefore.
The true hemlock is known as a macrofossil from Roman sites in Wales,
and that fact taken together with its well-known use in Classical medicine
and presence in the Anglo-Saxon herbals suggest that it has had many cen-
turies to infiltrate any older, indigenous tradition of its use that may have
existed here. Much of its distribution as a wild plant in the British Isles today
may indeed be a legacy of its cultivation for medicinal purposes. The situa-
tion, though, has been complicated by the trumpeting of hemlock juice as a
cure for cancer in the mid-eighteenth century by the much-respected Vien-
Ivy and Umbellifers 187