published accounts of ostensibly folk usage. That process has been so wide-
spread that the two traditions are now inextricably and irremediably mixed in
the literature. All that it is possible to do is to indicate instances where, on the
balance of probability, a particular record appears to belong to one tradition
rather than the other. This has accordingly been done in the pages that follow.
Incases where the folk credentials of a species as a whole seem doubtful, this
has been indicated by introducing the text of the entry with ‘(Folk credentials
questionable)’ or ‘(Folk credentials lacking)’. In other instances, reservations
are expressed in the body of the text. The same course has been followed
wherever a plant identification is judged either wrong or at least open to ques-
tion, and if a species as a whole is judged to have been misidentified, the text
of its entry is introduced with ‘(Identification dubious)’, ‘(Name ambiguity
suspected)’ or something similar.
Because so much that has appeared on paper about the use of plants for
medicine has been written in ignorance of these different ways in which ‘folk’
has been understood and the composite character of the term as a result, very
little of the printed literature is safe to draw upon for reconstruction of the
folk tradition. The herbals have to be firmly disregarded except in so far as
they explicitly identify a few uses as those of the rustic or unlettered. For the
same reason, the remarkable number of household books of remedies that
survive in the countries’ archives have regretfully had to be set aside, too. A
high proportion of the remedies these contain are probably folk ones, and it
may eventually be possible to identify which those are; attaining the level of
expertise necessary for that still lies in the future, though.
Besides steering clear of so much of the published literature, it has also
seemed advisable to treat very circumspectly information relating to herbs
grown in gardens, even if they are cottage gardens. In many cases the herbs
may have been transplanted from the wild, so their use is little different from
going out into the countryside to collect them as required. In many more
cases, though, such plants will have originated exclusively from cultivated
stocks and probably owe their presence to recommendations in the herbals.
Some of the best-known garden herbs do not feature in these pages in view
of this.
Finally, deliberately little or nothing has been said about the marked
revival of interest in the therapeutic potential of wild plants that has taken
place in the West from World War II onwards. It is difficult to open a news-
paper these days without being reminded that roughly half the world’s phar-
maceutical products in use today are plant-derived. Yet most of this recent
Herbs Without the Herbals 29