Figwort

Figwort is a perennial herb of the temperate Northern Hemisphere, missing only from western North America, that favours damp ground and disturbed, cultivated waste places. From a horizontal rootstock it raises thick, sharply four-angled stems, up to 150 cm by Wikipedia's measure and about three feet by Kynes's, carrying pairs of toothed leaves that taper to a point. Small, rounded flowers sit in loose sprays at the top; Kynes describes a two-lobed reddish-brown upper lip over a shorter green lower lip, and the capsule that follows is egg-shaped, or, to her eye, like a fig. Under the doctrine of signatures its throat-like flowers marked it as a cure for scrofula, a disease of the throat. Greek and Anglo-Saxon healers both used it. Celtic tradition linked it to flowing milk and a generous land, and in the Hebrides and on Skye it was a charm to guard cows and keep their milk coming. Scots turned it against faeries, while the Irish counted it a faerie plant and called it fothram, a name said to mean that a figwort growing beneath an elder took on the elder's power. In England it was held in the smoke of the Midsummer bonfire before being hung indoors or worn for protection, and Cunningham has it worn at the neck to keep the wearer well and turn aside the evil eye.