Daisies 311children the leaves, instead of being smoked, were boiled in milk.^422 The oint-
ment for swellings once popular on the Scottish border was also much
employed in ‘Ulster’^423 in the past. Britain has apparently had no counterpart,
though, to the valuing of the plant for earache in Wicklow^424 and neuralgia in
Limerick.^425
Petasites hybridus (Linnaeus) P. Gaertner, Meyer & Scherbius
butterbur, thunder-dock, wild rhubarb
Europe, northern and western Asia; introduced into North America
An odd feature ofPetasites hybridusis that the male and female plants are
verydifferent in appearance and, in Britain at least, have very different dis-
tributions, the females restricted mainly to the northern half of England, the
males found much more widely. Preferential planting of the male seems the
only way to account for this, but evidence of that has yet to be discovered.
Beekeepers may have valued the male for the profusion of its flowers, it has
been suggested, or farmers may have found the greater vegetative vigour
resulting from its not setting seed produced larger leaves in which to pack
butter.^426 That it may have had some special role in folk medicine is clearly
another possibility. The bitter, very resinous root of butterbur was at one time
valued for its sweat-inducing action (like that of thrift) and caused it to be
used extensively for plague and fevers, bringing it the namePestilenzwurzin
German. If the roots of the male plant gained a reputation as the more effec-
tive, that might have been the one chosen for cultivating (or even importing
from the Continent). In one Cornish village a tradition persisted that the but-
terbur owedits presence in the churchyard to having sprung from the graves
of the victims of an especially severe outbreak of plague in which this herb
proved its worth.^427 Asthat is only one of two records traced in the folklore lit-
erature (the other from the Highlands^428 )ofthe employment of the species
for that purpose in Britain or Ireland, the far-fetched explanation to account
for the plant’s presence suggests that it was a use that was unfamiliar.
It is in quite other connections, rather, that butterbur features in the folk
records. Suggestively, three of those are from the region to which the female
plant is mainly restricted: Durham, as a treatment for spots and sores,^429
Berwickshire, for white swellings on the knees,^430 and Roxburghshire, for
scurvy.^431 Elsewhere in Britain the species has been valued for shingles in
Cornwall^432 (but combined with brambles), rheumatism in Somerset^433 and
dropsy in the Highlands.^434