Herbs, trees and flowers in tradition

Herbs, trees, flowers and fungi appear throughout the correspondence traditions: assigned to planets and signs, used in incense and ritual, and catalogued in the herbals. Astrological herbalism, in which a plant's ruling planet indicates its medical and magical use, is set out by writers such as Nicholas Culpeper, whose seventeenth-century herbal keyed English plants to the planets that governed them.

A plant may carry a planetary and elemental rulership, a place in ritual and incense, a folkloric virtue, and a medicinal use, and the atlas records these several dimensions of the plant lore of many traditions.