Culpeper placed thyme under Venus, valuing it as a strengthening and cheering herb, its old domestic uses noted here as history. In folk belief thyme was strongly associated with the fairy folk: a bank of wild thyme was a place where the fairies danced, and it was one of the herbs gathered for charms to see them. It carried, too, a note of death and remembrance, planted on graves and, in some tellings, smelling of the souls of the dead who lingered near a battlefield. The bee-loved, honey-scented, courage-giving herb of the altar thus gathers meanings of bravery, sacrifice, the fairy world and remembrance.
Wild thyme has a specific and celebrated role in British conservation: it is the food plant on which the large blue butterfly's caterpillars begin feeding before being taken into ant nests to complete their strange life cycle, and the butterfly's local extinction in Britain in 1979 and its subsequent, carefully managed reintroduction depended directly on restoring thyme-rich grassland alongside the right ant species, a landmark case study in conservation biology built, in part, on this small aromatic herb. The plant itself is more various than the single common name suggests: over three hundred species of Thymus exist, and the wild thyme of English chalk downland, Thymus polytrichus, the food plant of the large blue butterfly described above, is botanically distinct from garden thyme, Thymus vulgaris, prized in the kitchen.