Levisticum officinale
AKA: False (or bastard) celery, love parsley, love ache, sea parsley
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Historically Used to Treat: Women’s reproductive health, urinary problems, digestion, bloating, pain, gas, poisoning, infection, fever, sore throat, lung problems, redness of the eyes, boils, jaundice, bee stings, freckles
Other Uses: Has a celery or cucumber-like flavor, frequently used as a salad herb. Shakers candied the roots in sugar, creating a treat called “smallage”. Sometimes put in shoes to prevent odor. Seeds were in used in bath to fight body odor in Tudor England.
CAUTION: May cause photodermatitis
”[Descript] It has many long and green stalks of large winged leaves, divided into many parts, like Smallage, but much larger and greater, every leaf being cut about the edges, broadest forward, and smallest at the stalk, of a sad green colour, smooth and shining; from among which rise up sundry strong, hollow green stalks, five or six, sometimes seven or eight feet high, full of joints, but lesser leaves set on them than grow below; and with them towards the tops come forth large branches, bearing at their tops large umbels of yellow flowers, and after them flat brownish seed. The roots grow thick, great and deep, spreading much, and enduring long, of a brownish colour on the outside, and whitish within. The whole plant and every part of it smelling strong, and aromatically, and is of a hot, sharp, biting taste.
[Place] It is usually planted in gardens, where, if it be suffered, it grows huge and great.
[Time] It flowers in the end of July, and seeds in August.
[Government and virtues] It is an herb of the Sun, under the sign Taurus. If Saturn offend the throat (as he always doth if he be occasioner of the malady, and in Taurus is the Genesis) this is your cure. It opens, cures and digests humours, and mightily provokes women’s courses and urine. Half a dram at a time of the dried root in powder taken in wine, doth wonderfully warm a cold stomach, helps digestion, and consumes all raw and superfluous moisture therein; eases all inward gripings and pains, dissolves wind, and resists poison and infection. It is a known and much praised remedy to drink the decoction of the herb for any sort of ague, and to help the pains and torments of the body and bowels coming of cold. The seed is effectual to all the purposes aforesaid (except the last) and works more powerfully. The distilled water of the herb helps the quinsy in the throat, if the mouth and throat be gargled and washed therewith, and helps the pleurisy, being drank three or four times. Being dropped into the eyes, it takes away the redness or dimness of them; it likewise takes away spots or freckles in the face. The leaves bruised, and fried with a little hog’s lard, and put hot to any blotch or boil, will quickly break it.”
Source: The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Complete Herbal, by Nicholas Culpeper, [109]
