Physick Garden

For as long as people have been ill, they have reached for plants, and those plants have sometimes helped and sometimes killed. Their uses survive in folklore, in old wives' tales, and in the colourful names given to plants in local areas. Many of these plants have also made their way into modern pharmacies, though often in forms nobody would predict. This book sketches an imagined physick garden filled with healing plants that different generations have relied on around the world. Did Renaissance women in Italy truly gamble with their lives when they put belladonna in their eyes? Does comfrey really help mend broken bones? Could St John's Wort chase off something more than evil spirits?

The tour moves through the human body, from the head down to the digestive system, and profiles 80 plants with unusual medicinal histories. Striking, dreamlike illustrations by Alice Smith accompany lively accounts of each one. The book makes the case that even the strangest herbal customs often have a logic behind them.