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CHAPTER 17 Distribution Patterns of Folk Medicinal Uses

Because the records of folk uses are for the most part so fragmentary, chrono-
logically as well as spatially, and in particular largely lacking for sizeable areas
of England and Scotland (in contrast to Ireland), distribution patterns of the
degree of completeness to which botanists or epidemiologists are accustomed
are too much to hope for. That very incompleteness means that some of the
patterns that have emerged in the foregoing pages may well be illusory, des-
tined to dissolve if and when additional records accumulate. This important
caveat needs to be borne in mind throughout what follows.
It also needs to be stressed that a herbal tradition based on plants available
in the wild will to a large extent have been shaped by the natural ranges of the
plant species concerned. The distribution patterns exhibited by many folk
remedies are thus products at one remove of those factors of climate or ter-
rain that set more or less strict limits to where the species can occur in the
quantity necessary to enable them to be exploited herbally. Outside those
limits the species are likely to have been too scarce, at least in more recent
times, to be reliably on hand whenever needed and to justify the effort
required to search for them. Though that restriction imposed by nature can
be overridden in many cases by taking the plants from the wild and growing
them domestically, cottage gardens tend to be relatively tiny and congested,
with food plants necessarily accorded priority; moreover, the same adverse
factors that render a herb scarce in the wild can make it resistant to attempts
to bring it into cultivation successfully.
The majority of the distribution patterns that emerge from the data, how-
ever, do not coincide, even very roughly, with the natural ranges of the spe-
cies concerned. Many herbal plants are to be found in some degree of plenty