Thyme

Thyme, Thymus vulgaris, is a small woody aromatic shrublet of the mint family, native to the Mediterranean and grown for the kitchen and the beehive; its flowers yield one of the most prized of honeys. Its Greek name is bound up with two ideas. It is linked to thymos, the seat of spirited courage, so that to smell of thyme was to be brave; and to thymiama, incense, for thyme was burned on altars as a fragrant offering, its very name perhaps meaning to fumigate or to sacrifice. Medieval ladies embroidered a sprig of thyme with a bee on the scarves they gave to knights, a token of courage.

Thyme's antiseptic reputation rests on a real chemical compound, thymol, first isolated from the plant in the nineteenth century and still used today as an active ingredient in some commercial mouthwashes and hand sanitisers, including formulations of Listerine, first marketed in 1879; thymol's genuine antimicrobial action is one of the few herbal correspondences in this family of articles with a straightforward modern chemical explanation rather than a purely symbolic one. Thyme honey has been prized since antiquity for a specific place: Mount Hymettus near Athens was already famous in the classical world for the quality of its thyme-fed honey, praised by ancient writers and still produced and marketed under that name in Greece today.

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.