PRIMROSE 67 
Woodruff was used in Chaucer’s day, but had no real curative 
properties. It was also employed to flavour wine and as a perfume 
for clothes. It was used for the liver and bile, epilepsy and palsy. It 
is very acidic. 
EssENTIAL SPECIFIC CHARACTERS :— 
143. Asperula odorata, L.—Stem erect, upper leaves 6-9, in 
whorl, lower whorls of 2-6 leaves, lanceolate, margins ciliate, flowers 
white, in terminal panicle, stalked, fruit with rough bristles. 
Primrose (Primula vulgaris, Huds.) 
A general favourite, common and widespread, its universal popu- 
larity bids fair to cause its entire disappearance from some districts, 
thanks to hawkers. It may be an ancient plant, but only its present 
distribution is known, which is throughout the Northern Temperate 
Zone, in Europe, except the north-east, and N. Africa. In Great 
Britain it is found in all parts except Peebles, and it grows at a height 
of 1600 ft. in Yorkshire. 
The Primrose—now much less widespread, as noted, than formerly, 
thanks also to the vandalism of the collector, the thoughtlessness of 
the householder—is or was a common plant which formerly adorned 
the glades in the woods, the meadows surrounding them, and the leafy 
lanes and banks of many secluded districts, especially in the south and 
west districts of England, where the climate is mild and moist. But 
in some of these spots it is now extinct. 
Everyone knows the Primrose. It has no stem, except the flower- 
ing stalk or scape. The leaves are all radical leaves. The Primrose 
has the rosette habit. The rootstock is stout. The leaves are more 
or less without a stalk (as are the umbels), inversely egg-shaped, 
spoon-shaped, or oblong, tapering downwards, softly hairy below, 
wrinkled, scalloped. The young leaves are rough, netted. 
The flowers are pale yellow, rarely pale lilac or purplish, drying 
green, in an umbel which is stalkless, so that the flower-stalks look like 
scapes as long as the leaves. The bracts are linear. The flowers are 
spreading or more or less erect. The radical flower-stalks are softly 
hairy, and bear one flower only. The limb of the corolla is flat, with 
a ring of scale-like folds at the mouth, which is narrow. The corolla 
lobes are rounded, notched. The calyx is softly hairy, slightly inflated, 
tubular, 5-angled, the teeth awl-like to lance-shaped, acute, long-pointed. 
The capsule is as long, or half as long, as the calyx, egg-shaped, the 
long, straight teeth of the fruiting calyx meeting above on prostrate 
