MEDICINAL PLANTS in Folk Tradition

  St John’s-worts to Primulas 105

Columba, applied as a pad under the armpit or in the groin, to restore the
sanity of a young shepherd after long hours alone on the hillsides. This leg-
end gave rise to the Gaelic name translating as ‘St Columba’s oxterful’.^15 The
plants’ value for this purpose was trumpeted in the herbals—John Gerard
recommended them for melancholia—and, despite the major place they have
occupied in Germany allegedly as a folk cure, it may be that this particular use
is wholly a legacy of the learned tradition and not truly a folk one at all.

Hypericum perforatum, St John’s-wort (Fuchs 1543, fig. 476)