trariwise, this tree’s employment in a salve for burns or scalds has been
recorded very widely in Ireland but scarcely at all in Britain.
An alternative form in which countrywide contrasts are found is diago-
nally: between Ireland plus Scotland on the one hand and England (plus in
some cases Wales) on the other. Three herbs exhibit this pattern, each in
rather different ways. In Potentilla anserina (silverweed) the dichotomy is a
wholesale one, embracing all the recorded uses; in Iris pseudacorus (yellow
iris) it is between just a single use (for toothache) in the north and west and
several uses in the south and east; while in Glechoma hederacea (ground-ivy)
just two uses out of a diversity of known ones constitute the polar opposites:
it is a cold cure in the ‘Celtic’ countries (that useful term popularly employed
in a non-linguistic sense to cover Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man
and Cornwall) and a tonic in central and southern England.
That use ofIris pseudacorus to ease toothache is one of quite a number of
instances of therapeutic properties that would otherwise be wholly Irish
extending across to the Western Isles and/or Highlands of Scotland. Others
are the valuing ofRorippa nasturtium-aquaticum (water-cress) and Asple-
nium trichomanes (maidenhair spleenwort) for feverish complaints, and
Senecio jacobaea (common ragwort) for drawing boils and the like. In addi-
tion, Ireland and that stretch of Scotland appear to have had more or less
exclusive monopolies of several plants as herbs:Leucanthemum vulgare
(oxeye daisy),Lathyrus linifolius (bitter-vetch),Lemna species (duckweed),
Sphagnum species (bog-moss),Parmelia species (the lichens generically
known as crotal)—and Palmaria palmata (dulse), and Chondrus crispus and
Mastocarpus stellatus (Irish moss) among the seaweeds. Most if not all these
range far more widely in the British Isles as a whole and can be found else-
where in them in at least comparable quantities, so a general similarity in the
natural environment can hardly stand up as an explanation for that shared
legacy of use. That the pattern is the result of cultural links, going back per-
haps many centuries, does seem more likely; and that likelihood is strength-
ened by the fact that it is in just its northernmost counties of Donegal and
Londonderry—in so far as the records traced go—that Ireland has shared
with either northern or western Scotland faith in the healing powers ofAsple-
nium trichomanes and Lathyrus linifolius.
Cultural links, too, rather than floristic or environmental affinities must
surely be the explanation for certain uses being common to Ireland and the
‘Celtic fringe’ of Britain as a whole. For how else are we to account for the
restriction of records for applying Rumex species (docks) to burns or scalds
Distribution Patterns 339