Immortelle

Immortelle, also called curry plant and Italian strawflower, is a daisy-family plant of dry, rocky or sandy Mediterranean ground. Wikipedia describes a plant 60 cm or more tall with yellow flowers that keep their colour when picked and are used in dried arrangements, and a resinous, somewhat bitter scent. Its young shoots and leaves are used in stews, and it appears in the traditional medicine of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kynes writes that wreaths of it were laid on statues of deities, graves and tombs by the ancient Greeks and Romans, that it is tied to All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, and that in Victorian England a wreath hung on the door of a house in mourning. A wreath in the grave was believed to hold the spirit of the dead in place. She places dried flowers on the Samhain altar to connect with the departed, and keeps a drop of the essential oil on cotton wool with her tools.