Gentian

Yellow gentian is a tall perennial of the alpine and sub-alpine pastures of central and southern Europe, found from the mountains of Spain and Portugal and the Pyrenees through the Alps to the Balkans, though it reaches neither northern Europe nor the British Isles. A thick, yellowish-brown, intensely bitter root, often a foot long and sometimes far longer, sends up a stem of a metre or more with paired, stiff, pointed leaves, yellowish green and strongly veined, which clasp the stem higher up. Large, wheel-shaped, deep yellow flowers, sometimes flecked with brown, crowd in orange-yellow whorls where the upper leaves meet the stem. The genus is named after Gentius, a king of Illyria in the second century BC whom Pliny and Dioscorides credited with finding the plants' medicinal worth. In the Middle Ages gentian was taken as an antidote to poison, and before hops it was one of the bitter herbs now and then used in brewing; its dried root, gathered across central and southern Europe, remained the chief vegetable bitter of the pharmacy. In magic it is added to love baths and sachets, lends extra power to any incense or sachet it joins, and is used to break hexes and curses.