From Blue to Purple 



lar names for the most part testifying to the plant's virtue as a 

 love-philter, bridal token, and general cure-all, has now become 

 naturalized from the Old World on the Atlantic and Pacific Slopes, 

 and is rapidly appropriating waste and cultivated ground until, 

 in many places, it is truly troublesome. \n general habit like 

 the blue vervain, its flowers are more purplish than blue, and are 

 scattered, not crowded, along the spikes. The leaves are deeply, 

 but less acutely, cut. 



Ages before Christians ascribed healing virtues to the ver- 

 vain — found growing on Mount Calvary, and therefore possessing 

 every sort of miraculous power, according to the logic of simple 

 peasant folk — the Druids had counted it among their sacred 

 plants. "When the dog-star arose from unsunned spots " the 

 priests gathered it. Did not Shakespeare's witches learn some 

 of their uncanny rites from these reverend men of old ? One is 

 impressed with the striking similarity of many customs recorded 

 of both. Two of the most frequently used ingredients in witches' 

 cauldrons were the vervain and the rue. " The former probably 

 derived its notoriety from the fact of its being sacred to Thor, an 

 honor which marked it out, like other lightning plants, as pecu- 

 liarly adapted for occult uses," says Mr. Thiselton Dyer in his 

 "Folk-lore of Plants." "Although vervain, therefore, as the en- 

 chanter's plant, was gathered by witches to do mischief in their 

 incantations, yet, as Aubrey says, it ' hinders witches from their 

 will,' a circumstance to which Drayton further refers when he 

 speaks of the vervain as "gainst witchcraft much avayling.'" 

 Now we understand why the children of Shakespeare's time hung 

 vervain and dill with a horseshoe over the door. 



In his eighth Eclogue, Virgil refers to vervain as a charm to 

 recover lost love. Doubtless this was the verbena, the herba 

 sacra employed in ancient Roman sacrifices, according to Pliny. 

 In his day the bridal wreath was of verbena, gathered by the 

 bride herself. 



Narrow-leaved Vervain (K. angtisti folia), like the blue vervain, 

 has a densely crowded spike of tiny purple or blue flowers that 

 quickly give place to seeds, but usually there is only one spike at 

 the end of a branch. Thejeaves are narrow, lance-shaped, acute, 

 saw-edged, rough. From Massachusetts and Florida westward 

 to Minnesota and Arkansas one finds the plant blooming in dry 

 fields from June to August, after the parsimonious manner of the 

 vervain tribe. 



It is curious that the vervain, or verbena, employed by brides 

 for centuries as the emblem of chastity, should be one of the 

 notorious botanical examples of a wilful hybrid. Generally, the 

 individuals of distinct species do not interbreed ; but verbenas are 

 often difficult to name correctly in every case because of their 

 susceptibility to each other's pollen — the renson why the garden 



41 



