Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics: Embracing the Myths, Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore of the Plant Kingdom

In Short

This sweeping nineteenth-century compendium gathers the global mythology, rustic superstitions, and botanical folklore surrounding the vegetable kingdom into a structured study of human imagination. Combining thematic essays with an exhaustive alphabetical encyclopedia, the work traces how ancient civilizations, Christian traditions, and rural villagers transformed ordinary trees, herbs, and flowers into sacred symbols, magical talismans, or omens of fate. It explores cosmic world-trees supporting the universe, sacred groves inhabited by dryads, witching herbs used for love divinations, and agricultural practices tied strictly to the phases of the moon. Rather than offering a standard botanical manual, it documents the psychological and cultural history of humanity's relationship with nature. The collection has endured because it bridges classical literature, Oriental myth, and European peasant customs with remarkable detail, preserving forgotten rural remedies, seasonal festivals, and weird plant fables before modern industrialization erased them. By giving equal weight to classical poets like Ovid and Virgil alongside obscure provincial legends, it serves as an irreplaceable treasury of sacred history and romantic green lore.

The Story

The narrative of plant tradition opens at the very dawn of creation, where human consciousness first seeks to explain its own existence through the vegetable world. Across early cosmologies, trees are cast not merely as scenery, but as the progenitors of mankind and the structural pillars of the universe itself. Teutonic legends situate unborn souls inside hollow boles overhanging quiet pools, guarded by the cloud-goddess Frau Holda, while Scandinavian and Byzantine mythologies envision colossal world-trees—such as the Ash Yggdrasill or a vast iron tree rooted in divine power—whose branches sustain heaven, earth, and the underworld. Persian tradition similarly describes the Tree of Life, Haoma, sprouting from the primal steer created by Ormuzd, yielding the first human couple, Mâshya and Mashyôî, before evil introduced destructive fruit into their terrestrial paradise.

From these creation myths, the investigation shifts to how early societies translated veneration into annual rituals and communal festivals. Across Europe and Asia Minor, spring celebrations center upon blossoming boughs like the Hawthorn, May Lily, Lilac, and Elm. In ancient Greece, three-year-old children are crowned with spring blossoms to celebrate surviving infancy, a practice later absorbed by Roman Catholic tradition in flower-strewn Corpus Domini processions. Seasonal rhythms bind communities to nature through agricultural thanksgiving, such as bringing home decorated harvest boughs in France and Germany, or hanging wool-wrapped olive branches beside Athenian doorways to honor Apollo. Springs and wells are similarly adorned with floral offerings to secure natural blessings.

This pagan reverent framework transitions smoothly into Christian symbolism, where the Catholic Church reinterprets wild plants through the lives of saints and sacred calendar days. Red roses are tied to the blood of martyrs, springing from the ashes of a condemned maiden in Bethlehem; Avens, known as the Blessed Herb, acquires the power to banish demonic forces; and the Snowdrop becomes the Fair Maid of February, honoring the Feast of the Purification. Specific herbs are mapped onto the liturgical year, creating a living calendar where Lady’s Smocks mark the Annunciation, Harebells mark St. George, and Michaelmas daisies decorate autumn altars.

Yet alongside sacred devotion exists an older, darker fear of plant animism and divine retribution. In classical literature, trees possess living spirits capable of suffering and vocal distress. Ovid’s tales demonstrate how transformed nymphs—such as Daphne turning into a Laurel or Phaethon’s weeping sisters becoming Poplars—retain human feelings within their bark. When the Thessalian Erisichthon impiously chops down Ceres’ sacred Oak, the tree groans, bleeds, and warns him with its dying breath of imminent divine vengeance, an act that leads to his inescapable starvation.

This belief in nature’s agency extends into rural folk magic, medicine, and witchcraft. Peasant traditions assign supernatural powers to everyday plants: Catmint triggers quarrels, Crocus induces laughter, and coffin wood buried in a cabbage bed repels caterpillars. Witches assemble spells using grave-grown Yarrow, Bracken fern stems cut to reveal a future lover's initials, and the Witches' Chain woven from Holly, Mistletoe, and Acorns. Maidens wash their faces in dawn-gathered Lilies of the Valley to erase freckles or soak Tansy in buttermilk to enhance their beauty.

As the study moves into wondrous and mythical flora, it documents extraordinary specimens recorded by ancient travelers and naturalists. Accounts detail Java’s iron-sapped Mesonsidereos tree, fire-nourishing trunks growing amidst volcanic vents on Mount Gheschidago, and Japanese Palms that wither if touched by water yet revive when planted in iron filings and sand. Other accounts describe fabulous trees like the Hesperides’ golden apples, the Singing Tree of the Arabian Nights, and the Poet’s Tree growing over the musician Tan-Sein’s tomb, whose leaves grant melodic vocal skills to those who chew them.

This commentary on natural wonders leads into practical agricultural lore governed by celestial bodies. Historical herbalists like Tusser and Sir Hugh Plat insist that planting, grafting, and harvesting must adhere strictly to lunar phases. Peas and beans sown during a waning moon yield abundant pods rather than excess straw, while Stock Gilliflowers removed during full moons produce double blossoms.

The narrative then addresses the solemn realm of funereal customs and grave lore. Distant cultures deposit deceased infants in tree-hung baskets or earthen pots buried beneath roots, while Western traditions plant sombre, evergreen foliage in churchyards. Dark trees like the Cypress, Yew, and weeping Willow personify grief, yet their perpetual verdure simultaneously symbolizes eternal life and resurrection, shielding the dead from evil vapors and night spirits.

Finally, the study culminates in an extensive alphabetical catalog that systematically examines individual plants. Snapdragons protect wearers from witchcraft; Apples carry the weight of mythological history from Iduna’s youth-restoring fruit to Atalanta’s race; Balm of Gilead demands testing by fire and protection from music-sensitive aspic serpents; and the Bramble cures boils while binding down churchyard graves. The Cherry carries tales of Joseph’s sullen refusal and the miraculous bending branch; Elders hold the spirit of the Elder-mother; and Moonwort possesses the power to pull shoes off horses' hooves. From the sacred Soma drink of Vedic immortality to the Rose of Jericho expanding at birth, and the dark churchyard Yew valued under ancient Welsh laws, the work completes its journey across the plant kingdom, demonstrating that every leaf and petal carries the indelible imprint of human imagination, faith, and fear.

How It Unfolds

Cosmic boles and primal creation The investigation begins with world-trees that uphold the universe across Scandinavian, Teutonic, and Rabbinic mythologies. Ancient peoples trace human origin directly to timber, placing unborn souls inside hollow boles or deriving the first human couple from sacred trees in earthly Paradises. This foundational lore establishes trees not as inanimate foliage, but as the primary bridge between mortals and the divine.

Spring crowns and harvest boughs Seasonal festivals transform ancient plant worship into civic and religious rituals throughout Europe and Asia Minor. Communities celebrate May-day with flowering Hawthorn and Elm boughs, while Athenians crown three-year-old children with spring blossoms to mark their survival past early childhood. These traditions persist in Catholic Corpus Domini processions, where young children dressed as angels scatter fragrant Bay leaves across town streets.

Sacred herbs and Franciscan calendars Christian lore re-purposes pagan veneration by linking wild plants directly to saints, martyrs, and holy days. Red roses spring from the ashes of a martyred maiden in Bethlehem, while Avens drives evil spirits away from domestic hearths. Franciscan friars construct living calendars where white Snowdrops mark Candlemas and blue Harebells signal the festival of St. George, turning nature into a holy timepiece.

Groaning trunks and dryad vengeance Classical literature presents trees as sentient entities inhabited by spirits that feel human agony and sorrow. Ovid depicts grief-stricken nymphs transformed into weeping Poplars and Laurels that continue to bleed when their stems are broken. Impious acts, such as Erisichthon felling Ceres' sacred Oak, provoke terrifying curses from dying dryads that doom unrepentant transgressors to eternal, consuming hunger.

Witching charms and midnight spells Peasant tradition weaves plants into daily sorcery, medicine, and courtship rituals. Village witches instruct maidens to seek four-leaved clover, cut fern roots to reveal a future husband's initials, or sow hemp in midnight churchyards on Valentine's Eve. Meanwhile, domestic superstitions warn that Catmint causes violent quarrels, while wild Thyme, Sunflowers, and Nettles protect dairy milk from thunder.

Salamander plants and metallic sap Travelers and naturalists document botanical marvels that defy standard natural laws across distant lands. Accounts describe Java’s Mesonsidereos tree containing iron wire in place of pith, alongside Tartar salamander plants that glow red in fire without burning. Mythical trees like the leaf-singing boughs of the Arabian Nights and the voice-imparting Poet’s Tree further blur the line between natural growth and magic.

Lunar cycles and orchard rules Practical agriculture aligns closely with celestial movements and astrological influences. Farmers sow peas and beans during the moon's decline to ensure plants produce rich seed pods rather than useless straw. Herbalists like Sir Hugh Plat instruct gardeners to transplant Stock Gilliflowers during specific full moons to force single blooms into rich double flowers through courtly patience.

Funereal Yews and grave sods Burial customs across cultures employ dark or weeping foliage to honor the dead and express solemn grief. Indian tribes place infant graves beneath tree roots, while Western churchyards plant long-lived Yews and Cypresses to absorb putrid vapors. Evergreen branches thrown into open graves symbolize the soul's resurrection and immortality, bridging mortality with hope.

Encyclopedic roots and sacred blossoms The final section systematically catalogs individual plants from Antirrhinum to Yew, detailing their specific historical legends and powers. Snapdragons repel witchcraft, Balm of Gilead requires fire tests to prove its purity, and Moonwort pulls iron shoes from passing horses. The collection concludes by demonstrating how every plant, from the Vedic Soma to the Rose of Jericho, carries centuries of human folklore.

The People

Richard Folkard, Jun. seeks to systematically collect, translate, and organize the vast, scattered traditions of botanical folklore amassed from horticultural journals and Continental scholars like Angelo De Gubernatis. Standing in his way is the sheer breadth of unclassified myth, forgotten regional customs, and his own dual role as both author and printer, which deprives him of blaming typographical errors on pressmen. He ends up producing a meticulous, permanent two-part treasury that saves fragile plant mythology from being lost to modern industrialization.

Erisichthon, an arrogant Thessalian nobleman blinded by impiety, wants to assert absolute dominance over nature by felling a venerable Oak tree in Ceres' sacred grove. Standing in his way are the pleas of his cautious servants, a pious bystander whom Erisichthon brutally beheads with an axe, and the vocal warnings of the Dryad residing within the groaning, bleeding trunk. He ends up struck down by divine vengeance, condemned by Ceres to endure an insatiable, perpetual hunger that ultimately consumes him.

The Virgin Mary desires to eat ripe cherries from a high branch during her journey into Egypt before giving birth to Christ. Standing in her way is Joseph’s sullen, ill-tempered refusal to climb the tree, mockingly telling her to let the child's true father provide the fruit. She ends up receiving divine intervention as the cherry branch bows down spontaneously to her hand, establishing the Cherry as a sacred emblem dedicated to her in Christian tradition.

La Cour, a seventeenth-century Dutch florist driven by extreme jealousy and pride, wants to preserve absolute exclusivity over the double-flowering Tuberose he successfully cultivated from seed. Standing in his way is his own horticultural success, which produces far more roots than his gardens can possibly accommodate. Rather than allowing anyone else to grow the prized bloom, he ends up destroying all his surplus roots by chopping them to pieces, triumphantly boasting that he remains the only person in Europe who possesses the rare plant.

Robert Turner, an ardent Royalist English herbalist, seeks to document genuine botanical cures like Hound's Tongue while upholding traditional medical wisdom. Standing in his way are severe dog bites requiring fourteen weeks of useless surgical treatment, alongside Puritan contemporaries like "Jack Presbyter" whom he views as hypocritical Sabbath-breakers driven by financial greed. He ends up curing his own stubborn bite using crushed leaves and publishing outspoken herbal commentaries, demonstrating his fierce independence and devotion to botanical remedies.

In Its Own Voice

In outlining how a Franciscan friar aligns natural spring blossoms with the Catholic liturgical year, the text illustrates a monk's floral calendar:

Mindful of the Festivals which our Church prescribes, I have sought to make these objects of floral nature the timepieces of my religious calendar, and the mementos of the hastening period of my mortality. Thus I can light the taper to our Virgin Mother on the blowing of the white Snowdrop, which opens its flower at the time of Candlemas; the Lady’s Smock and the Daffodil remind me of the Annunciation; the blue Harebell, of the Festival of St. George; the Ranunculus, of the Invention of the Cross; the Scarlet Lychnis, of St. John the Baptist’s day; the white Lily, of the Visitation of our Lady; and the Virgin’s Bower, of the Assumption; and Michaelmas, Martinmas, Holy Rood, and Christmas have all their appropriate decorations.

When describing Erisichthon’s impiety in felling Ceres' sacred Oak, the narrative captures the supernatural horror that grips the wounded trunk:

Sighs heav’d and tremblings shook the frighted Oak; Its leaves look’d sickly, pale its Acorns grew, And its long branches sweat a chilly dew, But when his impious hand a wound bestow’d, Blood from the mangled bark in currents flow’d.

In recording the ancient belief that Moonwort possesses mysterious power over iron, the text quotes Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas:

Horses that, feeding on the grassie hills, Tread upon Moonwort with their hollow heels, Though lately shod, at night goe barefoot home, Their maister musing where their shooes become.

What It's Really About

Beneath its vast collection of botanical trivia, the work investigates the deep human drive to project sacred meaning, moral order, and spiritual agency onto the natural environment. It explores how ancient civilizations and rural communities used plant life to answer fundamental questions about cosmic origins, divine justice, mortality, and the supernatural. Rather than treating regional folklore as mere foolish superstition, the text reveals it as a vital historical framework through which pre-industrial societies sought order and control over an unpredictable physical world. By tracking how a single plant—such as the Oak, Hazel, or Yew—transitions smoothly from a pagan deity to a Christian saintly symbol, the work demonstrates the remarkable continuity of human religious imagination across shifting cultures. Furthermore, it highlights the psychological power of belief systems like the Doctrine of Signatures, wherein physical traits in nature were understood as divine clues exposing hidden curative virtues. Ultimately, the book argues that humanity’s relationship with the botanical realm is inherently poetic and spiritual, reflecting our universal desires for healing, security, immortality, and connection to the sacred cosmos. It reminds the reader that every modern garden and wild hedgerow remains steeped in centuries of forgotten stories, mythic fears, and ancestral reverence.

Why Read It Today

This work will deeply captivate naturalists, folklorists, gardeners, and lovers of historical mythology who relish discovering the hidden cultural stories behind everyday plants. Reading it feels like walking through an ancient, untamed overgrown garden alongside an exceptionally knowledgeable nineteenth-century antiquarian guide. The prose moves fluidly between classical Latin poetry, medieval herbal remedies, and rural British superstitions, offering continuous surprises on every page—from French harvest customs and Athenian flower festivals to Indian tree worship and Swedish witch charms. It restores a forgotten dimension of wonder to botanical study by showing how every flower once spoke a complex language of faith and magic. What stays with you long after closing the volume is a transformed vision of the natural landscape; ordinary shrubs like the Bramble, Hazel, or Elder are no longer mere greenery, but living monuments carrying centuries of human hope, fear, and poetic imagination.

However, modern readers must navigate several distinct period challenges before diving in. At roughly six hundred pages, its sheer density and encyclopedic scope demand patient, leisurely browsing rather than a single continuous straight-through reading. The text heavily incorporates archaic sixteenth-century English spellings, agricultural verse from authors like Thomas Tusser and Master Fitzherbert, and un-translated Latin verse couplets from Virgil and Columella that require close attention. Furthermore, the volume reflects nineteenth-century colonial perspectives, occasionally employing dated terminology when categorizing foreign customs or Oriental traditions. Ancient medical claims—such as using crushed Hound’s Tongue for rabid dog bites, rotting Basil under jars to generate scorpions, or carrying coffin wood to repel caterpillars—must naturally be appreciated purely as historic cultural artifacts rather than usable advice. Yet for those willing to embrace its Victorian prose, historical idiosyncrasies, and sprawling structure, the book delivers an enormously rich, enchanting immersion into the lost mythic realm of the plant kingdom.