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Flower history is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a colorful subject to say the least. The hair raising exploits of the great 17th, 18th and 19th century plant hunters, who were responsible for bringing us the majority of our garden plants, can make a Robert Ludlum novel seem like a yawn.
But before these early Indiana Jones characters took centre stage, many of our great garden plants came from another fascinating source: the rich and ancient world of the herb garden. These were places of powerful healing and ancient wisdom – that were inextricably linked to the complex, primal world of magic and witchery. And no herb garden was complete without a substantial stock of one of the most important and influential plants of all: the sedum.
The powerful magic of sedum was rooted in the astonishing ability of some varieties to continue to grow long after being removed from the soil. Even the great 16th century herbalist, John Gerrard, an early voice of science and reason, simply said “This plant is very full of life.” It was this resistance to drying and dying that gave it such significant superstitious value. Tradition dictated that sedum be plucked on midsummer’s eve (herbs gathered on this night were considered extremely potent) and hung indoors where they remained alive often until Christmas. |
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Every home was generously decorated with sedum so that everyone under the roof “shall be troubled with no Distemper so long as it continues green.” If it suddenly withered, it meant someone in the house would die. It was also carefully planted on the thatched roofs of homes and barns to ward off lightning.
Its magic also included the power of divination, particularly regarding romance. Maidens wanting to know if a suitor was true would carefully collect and hang two plants up side-by-side. If the plants twisted toward each other, marriage was coming; if they turned away, the lover was false.
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Like most plants with a far-reaching herbal history, sedum have a long list of delightful common names, including ‘Welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk’,
Witches’-moneybags, Prick-Madam and Midsummer-Men. More prosaically it was called Live-forever, Evergreen, Live-long, stonecrop, wall pepper and orpine. Even when it came time to give it a proper name, botanists seemed to have been inspired to whimsy: sedum is Latin for ‘plant-that-sits’.
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