Borage

Borage, Borago officinalis, is a bristly annual with brilliant blue star-shaped flowers and a cool cucumber-like scent, long grown in kitchen and cottage gardens. Its oldest and most consistent reputation is as a plant of gladness and courage: Pliny records that steeped in wine it drove away sorrow and gave cheer, and an old couplet, ego borago gaudia semper ago, I, borage, always bring joy, fixes the theme. Its flowers were floated in the stirrup-cup given to departing crusaders and jousters to hearten them, and it still garnishes summer drinks.

Modern herbal medicine has focused less on borage's old cheering reputation than on borage seed oil, marketed as starflower oil, which is rich in gamma-linolenic acid and sold for skin conditions and premenstrual symptoms; clinical trial results have been mixed and inconclusive rather than clearly supportive. A caution belongs alongside this modern use: like its relative comfrey, borage contains small amounts of pyrrolizidine alkaloids capable of harming the liver, so that regulators in several countries restrict borage leaf and flower preparations, a genuine safety concern that sits oddly beside the plant's long reputation as nothing but a bringer of cheer.

Culpeper placed borage under Jupiter and the sign of Leo, the planet of expansive good cheer, which matched its ancient character exactly, and he repeats its use to comfort the heart and lift the spirits, given here as folk history. In the language of flowers and in folk correspondence borage stands for courage, bluntness and gladness, its bright blue star a natural emblem of a clear and cheerful spirit. Its symbolism is unusually stable across two thousand years: from Pliny to the herbalists to the Victorian flower-book, borage is the plant of good courage and a glad heart, meanings read from its heartening effect in wine and the frank blue of its flower.

Its bright blue star-shaped flowers were among those Elizabethan confectioners crystallised in sugar to decorate cakes and sweetmeats, a genuine piece of Tudor and Stuart sugar craft that survives today in a much smaller way, borage flowers still occasionally candied or floated fresh in punches and summer cocktails for exactly the same reason, their colour and shape rather than any flavour, since the bloom itself is nearly tasteless. The custom of adding a sprig of fresh borage to a glass of Pimm's or a summer cup, still followed in parts of England, is one of the very few pieces of borage's old cheer-giving reputation to have survived into ordinary modern drinking practice essentially unbroken from Pliny's wine-steeped remedy for sorrow.