Witch’s Garden

Plants in Folklore, Magic and Traditional Medicine

Sandra Lawrence

Welbeck 2020

Hb, 208pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781787394360

Two initial observations: this book looks gorgeous, and it isn’t massively witchy, but is all the better for that. This is a history of how humans have used plants to cure or kill, charm or curse, the superstitions that are associated with plants and their links to astrology and magic.

Witch’s Garden was produced in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, whose archive illustrates every other page: primarily colour plates of botanical specimens, with the odd mediæval manuscript added.

Each chapter deals with an aspect of plant use: preparing medicines, brewing a love potion or rediscovering the medicinal properties of plants in modern times. Liquorice has a remarkable history, used 4,000 years ago by the Babylonians, popular in mediæval England and an early addition to the mass-production of sweets in the late 18th century when Mr Dunhill invented his Pontefract Cakes. Lawrence crams a lot into each chapter – eight uses for fennel on just one page, for example – and the book is written in a breezy style which simply gallops along.

This is a delightfully engaging introduction to the relationship between humans and plants.

Paula Dempsey

★★★★