Angelica

Angelica, Angelica archangelica, is a tall, stout, sweet-scented plant of the carrot family, its hollow stems candied as a green sweetmeat and its roots and seeds used to flavour liqueurs. Its names lift it above the ordinary: angelica, the angelic herb, and archangelica, for the archangel, Michael in some tellings, Gabriel or Raphael in others, who was said to have revealed the plant in a dream as a protection and remedy in time of plague. It was reckoned to flower about the feast day of an archangel, which reinforced the heavenly association, a piece of folklore recorded here as history.

Angelica has a genuine and much older practical history in Scandinavia than its plague-legend suggests: the Sami people and other northern Scandinavians gathered and cultivated wild angelica as a valued food plant long before the archangel story attached to it, its stalks eaten raw or cooked and its value great enough that angelica gardens and even individual plants were, in places, privately owned and inherited property, a genuinely significant food resource in a short northern growing season. Candied angelica stem, dyed green, remains a traditional decoration for cakes and desserts in Britain and France today, one of the few candied fruits or stems still commercially produced by the old method of slow sugar impregnation.

Culpeper placed angelica under the Sun, and it was among the most esteemed of protective plants: carried, hung and burned to guard against witchcraft, evil spirits, poison and the plague, its very name an assurance of angelic favour, so that no witch, it was said, could work harm where angelica grew. It was strewn and its root worn as an amulet, and it served in charms of blessing and exorcism. A large, sweet, useful garden herb, angelica carries a symbolism entirely of light and protection, the archangel's gift against the dark, drawn from its imposing growth, its heavenly name and its old repute as a shield in time of pestilence.

A serious practical caution belongs with the plant even though it is not itself dangerous: angelica closely resembles several genuinely deadly members of the carrot family, including poison hemlock and water hemlock, and foragers gathering wild angelica have been fatally poisoned after misidentifying one of these lookalikes as the beneficial herb, a real and recurring hazard documented in modern poisoning statistics. This resemblance, rather than any property of angelica itself, is the practical reason modern foraging guides urge extreme caution or expert identification before gathering any wild member of this plant family at all.