Meadowsweet

Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria, is a tall perennial of wet meadows and stream-sides, its frothy creamy flower-heads carrying a heavy sweet scent. It was one of the most valued of strewing herbs, laid on floors to sweeten a room, and it flavoured mead and ale, which may be the true root of its name (meadwort) rather than any meadow. It is named as one of the three most sacred herbs of the Druids by later writers, alongside vervain and water-mint, a claim of the classical and antiquarian record rather than of first-hand testimony.

In Welsh myth meadowsweet is one of three plants, with broom and oak blossom, from which the wizards Math and Gwydion conjure Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers, as a bride for the hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, a story that later turns dark when Blodeuwedd betrays her husband and is transformed into an owl as punishment, but that begins with meadowsweet as one of the very materials of a living, magically created woman. The plant's heavy, sweet scent, which some find overwhelming in quantity, is concentrated in the flower rather than the leaf, and country tradition held that too much meadowsweet brought indoors could cause headache or drowsiness, a folk observation that fits oddly well with the salicylate chemistry discussed below.

Meadowsweet was a favourite bridal flower, strewn in the path and woven into garlands, and its old country names include bridewort; it stood in folk symbolism for peace, sweetness and marriage. There is a genuine footnote of science attached to it: the plant is rich in salicylates, the same family of compounds as in willow, and it was from meadowsweet, under its old botanical name Spiraea, that the drug name aspirin was coined, the a for acetyl and spirin for Spiraea. That historical fact of chemistry is given here as history and implies no medical use of the raw plant, which carries the sweetness, the wedding symbolism and the sacred Druidic reputation as its lasting meanings.

Modern herbalists sometimes note that meadowsweet, unlike isolated aspirin, also contains mucilage and tannins that may cushion its salicylate content against the stomach irritation the pure drug can cause, a plausible chemical argument rather than a proven clinical advantage, offered here as the kind of reasoning behind current herbal use rather than as medical advice. The plant remains a popular flavouring for country wines and cordials in Britain today, a direct continuation of its old role in mead and ale, showing that its oldest recorded use, flavour, has simply outlasted its once sacred and medicinal reputations.