Solomon's seal, Polygonatum, is a woodland perennial with arching stems, paired oval leaves and small greenish-white bell-flowers hung beneath. Its name comes from its thick horizontal rootstock, which is scarred where each year's stem has died away, leaving round depressions that were likened to the impressions of a seal, and, by legend, to the seal of King Solomon, the ring with which he was said to command spirits and to know the virtues of plants. Its old domestic use to close wounds and fade bruises is noted here as folk history.
A related East Asian species, Polygonatum sibiricum and its kin, is used in traditional Chinese medicine under the name huang jing, valued there as a tonic root quite independently of the European sealing-legend that shaped the plant's Western reputation, the two traditions reaching for the same woodland genus by entirely separate routes. The scars on the rootstock are in fact the true botanical origin of the plant's common name, left where the previous year's stem broke away, so that counting the scars gives a rough count of the plant's age, a method still used informally by foragers and gardeners today to judge how long a clump has been established.