Black Cohosh

Black cohosh is a tall perennial of the buttercup family, found wild in eastern North America, from southernmost Ontario down to Georgia and westward as far as Missouri and Arkansas, where it grows in woodland and small clearings. From a dark, knotted rootstock it raises large, much-divided, toothed leaves and, in early summer, slender spires of white flowers on stems that can pass two metres, with a sweet but fetid scent that draws flies and beetles. That smell earned it the name bugbane, and Kynes notes that when its dry seed heads stir in a breeze they sound faintly like a rattlesnake. She traces the word cohosh to an Algonquian term for rough, after the feel of the root. The Iroquois, Delaware, Algonquin and Cherokee all used it as medicine; it entered the United States Pharmacopoeia as black snakeroot in 1830, and Grieve records the American belief that the root countered poison and rattlesnake bite. Its root extracts are now sold mainly for menopausal complaints. In hoodoo it defends against tricks and conjured trouble. Cunningham puts it in love sachets, has it carried to give the timid courage, and sprinkles an infusion around a room or adds it to the bath to drive away evil presences.