Plantain, Plantago major and its relatives, is a tough low rosette-forming weed of paths and trodden ground the world over, sending up slender flower-spikes from a flat cluster of ribbed leaves. Its Anglo-Saxon name, waybread, marks where it grows, and it is one of the nine plants of the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, a tenth-century remedy against poison and infection, where it is addressed as the mother of herbs, old and open to the east, over which carts have creaked and women have ridden. Its old domestic use to staunch and soothe wounds is given here as folk history.
A close botanical relative, Plantago ovata, is the source of psyllium husk, still sold today as a bulk-forming dietary fibre supplement in pharmacies worldwide, a modern commercial use belonging to the same genus as the common dooryard weed, though the plantain of hedgerow and lawn, Plantago major, is a different species and not itself the source of the psyllium product. The plant's tough seed-spikes were also a plaything of English country children, who used them in a game called soldiers, snapping the flower-heads together in a duel to see whose stalk would decapitate the other's, a small piece of living folk-play recorded well into the twentieth century.