Scarlet Pimpernel

Scarlet pimpernel is a small, low-growing annual of the primrose family, long known as Anagallis arvensis, with weak, square, sprawling stems and paired, stalkless, oval leaves. From spring to autumn single flowers about a centimetre across open in the leaf axils, usually scarlet or orange-red but sometimes blue, pink or white. They open only in sunshine and shut when the sky clouds over, which earned it names such as poor man's weather-glass and shepherd's barometer. Native to Europe, western Asia and North Africa, it now grows as a weed of light soils, field edges and roadsides almost worldwide. The plant is bitter and acrid and has poisoned animals fed on it, yet it was once prized as a cure-all: the ancient Greeks gave it for low spirits and eye complaints, and Grieve records it as a cosmetic wash against freckles and a remedy for melancholy and epilepsy. An old writer she quotes held it good against witchcraft, and Kynes adds that it was hung over doorways in medieval England for that purpose, used in sixteenth-century Scotland to tell whether a wounded person would live, and believed in Ireland to give second sight and an understanding of birds and beasts. Kynes gives it to air, Mercury and the Sun, for clarity, protection, psychic abilities and truth.