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CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

amaranthus

AMARANTHUS

Names. Besides this common name, by which it is best known by the florists of our days, it is called flower-gentle, flower-velure, floramor, and velvet-flower.

Description. It being a garden-flower, and well known to every one that keeps it, I might forbear the description; yet, notwithstanding, because some desire it, I shall give it. - It runneth up with a stalk a cubit high, streaked, and somewhat reddish towards the root, but very smooth, divided towards the top with small branches, among which stand long broad leaves of a reddish green colour, and slippery. The flowers are not properly flowers, but tufts, very beautiful to behold, but of no smell, of a reddish colour; if you bruise them, they yield juice of the same colour; being gathered, they keep their beauty a long time; the seed is of a shining black colour.

Time : They continue in flower from August till the frost nips them.

Government and virtues : It is under the dominion of Saturn, and is an excellent qualifier of the unruly actions and passions of Venus, though Mars also should join with her. The flowers, dried, and beaten into powder, stop the terms in women, and so do almost all other red things. And by the icon, or image of every herb the ancients at first found out their virtues. Modern writers laugh at them for it; but I wonder in my heart how the virtues of herbs came at first to be known, if not by their signatures; the moderns have them from the writings of the ancients, the ancients had no writings to have them from. But to proceed: the flowers stop all fluxes of blood whether in man or woman bleeding either by the nose or wound. There is also another sort of amaranthus which bears a white flower, which stops the whites in women, and the running of the reins in men, and is a most singular remedy for the venereal disease.


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