Dill

Dill, a graceful umbellifer in Northcote's words, stands about three feet tall on a single upright stem, with fine, thread-like, blue-green leaves and broad, flat umbels of yellow flowers that give way to small, flat, ribbed oval seeds. It is easily taken for its relative fennel, which branches into several stems, and it is close kin to anise and caraway too. "Dill weed" means the leaves. Leaf and seed are both widely used in cooking; Northcote, in 1903, notes the leaves eaten with fish and pickled with cucumbers. Kynes records that Egyptians and Scythians used dill in preparing and decorating their dead, linked by the Greeks to Dionysus and woven by the Romans into wreaths for Bacchus. In medieval Europe it went into love potions and was counted a magician's herb, worked in black magic yet also used to foil witches: a cup of dill tea was thought to strip a witch of her power, and in Germany bunches hung in byres at Walpurgis and fed to cattle kept witches and evil spirits away. Cunningham hangs it over the door so that no one envious or ill-disposed can enter, lays it in a cradle to guard a child, carries it in protective sachets and adds it to the bath to make the bather irresistible.