Feverfew

Feverfew, Tanacetum parthenium, is a bushy aromatic perennial of the daisy family with small white-rayed flowers and a pungent scent, long grown in cottage gardens. Its English name is a worn-down form of the Latin febrifuga, fever-driver, recording the use for which it was chiefly valued; its old domestic reputation as a remedy for headache and fever is noted here as folk history and not as medical advice. The species name parthenium, from the Greek for maiden, is tied by legend to the Parthenon: the herb was said to have saved the life of a workman who fell during the building of the temple.

Feverfew is one of the few traditional herbs to have been seriously tested by modern medicine for a specific complaint, migraine: clinical trials since the 1980s have examined feverfew leaf as a preventive treatment, and a 2015 Cochrane systematic review found a modest reduction in migraine frequency compared with placebo, though it rated the evidence as low quality and called for larger, better-standardised trials before firm conclusions could be drawn. It is a rare instance in this atlas of a plant's old reputation as a remedy for headache converging, however inconclusively, on the very complaint modern researchers chose to investigate.

Culpeper placed feverfew under Venus, and it was planted about the house and dooryard both for use and for protection, held to purify the air and to guard the dwelling against sickness and ill fortune. In folk practice it stood as a general household protector, its strong scent read as a cleansing and defending influence. Its symbolism, warmth, protection, the driving-off of what harms, follows from the two facts that gave it its name and its place by the door: a penetrating aromatic bitterness and a long, genuine folk regard as a plant that eased the aching head.

A plain caution belongs alongside its old praise: fresh feverfew leaves can cause contact dermatitis and mouth ulcers in some people who handle or chew them regularly, a genuine and documented sensitivity rather than folklore, which is why modern preparations are more often taken as a processed extract than as the raw chewed leaf the old herbals describe. Its persistence as a self-seeding cottage-garden plant, springing up readily around old walls and waste ground near former dwellings, has also made it an informal marker of a long-abandoned garden, still flowering years after the house and its inhabitants are gone.

Feverfew is also a genuinely attractive plant to bees and other pollinators despite its bitterness to people, its small daisy flowers a reliable source of nectar in the cottage garden through much of the summer, one more small, practical virtue quietly attached to a plant chiefly remembered today for headache and household protection.