Fumitory, Fumaria officinalis, is a slender scrambling annual with grey-green much-divided leaves and small tubular pink-and-purple flowers, a common weed of cultivated fields. Its name means smoke of the earth, fumus terrae in Latin, and several old explanations were offered for it: that its fine bluish foliage seen across a field resembled a low smoke or mist, that its juice made the eyes water as smoke does, or the fancy that it was generated from vapours of the earth without seed. It was a valued spring cleansing herb, a use recorded here as folk history.
Fumitory water, distilled from the fresh plant, had a genuine old cosmetic use as a complexion wash, believed to clear freckles and blemishes and to lighten the skin, a folk beauty practice recorded in herbals from Gerard onward and given here as history rather than any cosmetic recommendation. Once an abundant weed of arable fields across Europe, fumitory has become markedly scarcer with the intensification of modern farming and the wider use of herbicides, and conservation bodies in Britain now list it among the arable wildflowers in genuine decline, a modern ecological postscript to a plant once considered an unremarkable nuisance.