Wood Betony

Wood betony, Betonica officinalis (also given as Stachys officinalis), is a low perennial of the mint family with a spike of reddish-purple flowers, once among the most highly esteemed of all healing and protective herbs. An old Italian proverb praised anyone of many virtues as having as many as betony, and a saying urged, sell your coat and buy betony. The physician Antonius Musa, said to have attended the emperor Augustus, was credited with a whole treatise on its virtues, listing it against a great catalogue of ills, a domestic reputation recorded here strictly as history.

Modern pharmacological investigation of wood betony has found comparatively little to justify the vast catalogue of cures once claimed for it: the plant contains mild tannins and alkaloids with some modest astringent and sedative action, but nothing that accounts for the sweeping medieval reputation recorded above, and its use today is largely confined to gentle herbal teas rather than any serious treatment, a case where an old plant's fame appears to have considerably outrun its actual chemistry. Botanists have also long argued over its correct genus, the plant classified at different times as Betonica officinalis and as Stachys officinalis, a small taxonomic dispute unresolved by any change in the plant's use.

Beyond the physic garden, betony was a powerful protective and counter-magical plant. It was planted in churchyards and worn as an amulet to drive away evil spirits, nightmares and despairing thoughts, and to guard against witchcraft and the visitations of the dead; medieval writers held that serpents would fight and kill one another if enclosed in a ring of it. Its whole symbolism gathers around protection of body and soul, a herb that healed the sick, guarded the sleeper against bad dreams, and kept ghosts from the grave. Once one of the most trusted plants in Europe, betony carries a consistent reputation as a shield against harm both bodily and spiritual.

Betony's reputation as a plant of protection was still being recorded by folklore collectors from ordinary country people in parts of rural Britain well into the twentieth century, worn, hung or planted by householders who had never read the older herbals but had simply inherited the practice from parents and grandparents, a case of learned medieval physic surviving for centuries as unwritten domestic custom long after the Latin treatises that first catalogued it had been forgotten by the people still using the plant. Modern gardeners who grow it now do so almost entirely for its handsome spike of reddish-purple flowers, a final, purely ornamental afterlife for a plant once trusted, more than almost any other, to guard both body and soul.