Mercury, and a Herb of Calm

Culpeper places lavender under Mercury, the planet of the mind and the nervous system in his scheme, which fits its long folk reputation as a herb for headache, agitation and troubled sleep, a correspondence read from the plant's calming aroma rather than derived from it. In the magical and folk tradition lavender is an emblem of cleanliness, serenity and devotion, carried against evil and used to invite peace into a house, and in the Victorian language of flowers it stood variously for devotion and for distrust. The gap between the plant's genuine, testable aromatic properties and the specific planetary and emotional meanings later attached to it is the usual one: the scent is real, the system built on it is interpretation.

Provence in southern France became the centre of the modern lavender industry from the nineteenth century onward, and true lavender oil from the region now carries a protected designation, Huile essentielle de lavande de Haute-Provence, an appellation d'origine controlee recognised since 1981 that restricts the name to oil distilled from a defined area and species, a modern regulatory structure applied to a plant whose folk reputation long predates any such protection.