Valerian

Valerian, Valeriana officinalis, is a tall perennial of damp meadows and stream-banks, bearing clusters of pale pink flowers and a root of famously heavy, earthy odour. Its name is usually derived from the Latin valere, to be strong or well, marking its ancient standing as a healing plant. The dried root strongly attracts cats, as catnip does, and rats too are drawn to it; one telling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin has him carry valerian to lure the rats from the town. Its long domestic reputation as a plant for troubled sleep and frayed nerves is recorded here as folk history, not as medical advice.

Valerian's reputation as a nerve remedy persisted into the twentieth century: it was reportedly issued as a calming draught to soldiers suffering shock and shattered nerves during the First World War, a use of the period's conventional pharmacopoeia rather than a folk survival. Modern clinical trials of valerian root for insomnia and anxiety have produced mixed and generally modest results, some showing a small benefit over placebo and others none at all, so that current medical opinion regards the plant's ancient calming reputation as plausible but not firmly established, a more cautious verdict than either its old praise or its herbal-shop marketing usually allows.

Culpeper placed valerian under Mercury, and its calming reputation carried into folk magic, where the root was used in charms for peace, sleep and reconciliation, hung in the home to still quarrels and laid where lovers had fallen out. Its powerful scent, unpleasant to many people, also gave it a protective role, buried or hung to turn away evil. In the Victorian language of flowers valerian stood, aptly, for an accommodating disposition. Its meanings cluster consistently around rest, harmony and the settling of strife, read from the genuine quieting effect of its warm root-infusion and the deep, animal pull of its smell.

The plant's pull on cats runs parallel to, but is chemically distinct from, the well-known effect of catnip, and valerian is in fact sometimes used by breeders and trainers precisely because many cats that ignore catnip still respond strongly to valerian root, a genuine feline behavioural quirk documented by veterinary researchers rather than folk fancy. Commercial cat toys are now sometimes scented with dried valerian root rather than catnip for exactly this reason, a small modern industry built on the same root once dried and hung in troubled human households in the hope of restoring peace.