CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

ALEXANDER

Names. Called also Alisanders, horse-parsley, wild-parsley, and the black pot-herb. The seed has frequently been sold for Macedonian parsley seed.

Description. It has a thick blackish root, white within, and smells sweet, but tastes somewhat acrid and bitter. The stalk is above a yard high, full, branchy, chanelled, and somewhat red. The leaves are of a yellowish green, larger than those of marsh-smallage, and the pieces rounder. On the top are pretty large umbels of small five-leaved white flowers, succeeded by large oblong-cornered black seed and chanelled.

Place. It grows wild upon the rocks by the sea-side, and was formerly cultivated in gardens.

Time. It flows in June and July, and the seed is ripe soon afterwards.

Government and virtues. This plant is under Jupiter, therefore friendly to nature. The whole plant has a strong warm taste, and was more used in the kitchen than in the medicinal way, having been either eaten raw, as a sallad among other herbs, or else boiled and eaten with salt meat, or in broths in the spring season. The root pickled was deemed a good sauce, but its use in the kitchen has been entirely superseded by the cultivation of celery. It is reckoned to be of the nature of parsley or smallage, but stronger, and therefore may be serviceable in opening obstructions of the liver and spleen, provoking wind and urine, and consequently good in the dropsy or stranguary. For this purpose, half a drachm of the seeds powdered, and taken in white wine, every morning, is seldom known to fail. It is likewise good for bringing on the courses, and expelling the after-birth, notwithstanding it is seldom used in medicine.

This herb has a mixed sort of smell between lovage and smallage; about December and January the shoots appear above ground, which taken before the leaves spread and grow green, and boiled in a pretty large quantity of water, and seasoned with butter, &c. are not only a very wholesome, but also a very pleasant-tasted spring food. The flower buds, and the upper part of the stalk in the beginning April, before the turfs spread, and the flowers open, are likewise very good, if managed the same way.