A Cottage Flora

This book recounts the traditions and practical advice that derive from centuries of contact between the cottager and the flowers in his garden.

How digitalis from the foxglove was an important ingredient in witches’ flying ointment, how the scream of an uprooted peony might kill a man, how the lavender became scented when the swaddling clothes of the Holy Child were spread to dry on a lavender bush. Rue, it appears, was strewn on prison floors to prevent goal-fever (typhus) and is still carried in posies by judges at assizes.

Peter Morter’s delicate and highly accomplished watercolours and David MacFadyen’s text, in the words of Arthur Marshall, ‘instruct and delight all garden flower and herb lovers’, and help to keep cottage flowers in their traditional place in our present-day gardens.