Welcome to Litsy!

Thank you Elizabeth! This book is stunning! And yes I absolutely love my Winter Solstice tonic for Winter blues 🤍🤍🤍and vegan soap- both looks and smells lovely. 🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍❄️🤍

100 herbs are included in this beautiful overview that covers history, folklore, gardening, cooking and healing. Some plants are less common—like carline, mitsuba & rice paddy herb—while others I think more of as ornamental, such as goldenrod & viola. The entries are brief & interesting. This book is designed for pleasure or as a starting point rather than for in-depth reference. I spent much time admiring the striking, stylized artwork.

… the French physician Hilarius thought that smelling too much basil would make you breed scorpions in your brain …

If you tread on St John‘s wort after sundown, you will be swept up on the back of a magic horse that will charge around until sunrise before depositing you on the open ground. Apparently.

Epazote. The odd smell—kerosene-like to some, lemony to others—is in the name: a member of the goosefoot family, epazote derives its name from the Aztec Nahuatl word for ‘skunk sweat.‘

Open afresh your round of starry folds,
Ye ardent marigolds!
-John Keats

The 17th-century scholar Robert Burton included borage beneath the engraved frontispiece of his classic book The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ‘to cheer the heart of those black fumes which make it smart.‘

…the Russian lines for this famous game are more full-on: ‘She loves me, she loves me not; she kisses me, she kisses me not; she presses me to her heart, she presses me not; she curses me to the Devil, she curses me not.‘

This book is soooooo beautiful! A Thames & Hudson book (sigh), it's a gorgeously illustrated compendium of herbs. Each has a two-page spread- one with facts and one with a fabulous drawing. Considering the beautiful way it's bound, it's also quite reasonably priced. I would love to make it through just one work day without adding to my TBR!