The primrose, Primula vulgaris, is a low woodland perennial of pale yellow flowers that open very early in the year; its name means first rose, from the Latin prima rosa, for its place at the front of the spring, though it is no rose at all. As one of the earliest and gentlest flowers of the returning year it became an emblem of youth, of new beginnings and of tender first love, and it carried too, from its brief early season, a note of youthful death cut short, the primrose path of Shakespeare leading pleasantly but to no good end.
Primrose flowers were also gathered for the kitchen and still-room in old England, made into a delicate primrose wine and crystallised as a sugared garnish for cakes and puddings, culinary uses recorded in seventeenth-century English receipt books alongside the plant's more famous ornamental and medicinal reputation. Its close relative the cowslip, Primula veris, shared much of the same folk regard as a herb of the nerves, and the two Primula species were often used and gathered somewhat interchangeably by country herbalists, though as with most such traditional nervine remedies, no rigorous modern clinical evidence supports the practice, and it is recorded here strictly as folk history.