Solomons Seal

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.

Culpeper placed Solomon's seal under Saturn and repeated the tradition that the sealing marks on the root revealed, by the doctrine of signatures, its power to seal up and close wounds. That same seal-lore gave the plant a place in protective and binding magic: the root was used in charms to seal a working, to bind and to guard, borrowing the authority of Solomon's ring over the spirit world. Its whole symbolism, sealing, closing, binding, protection, wisdom, grows from the single vivid image of the seal-scarred root and the great king whose name it bears, a plain botanical feature drawing to itself one of the richest names in magical tradition.

A plain caution belongs alongside the old wound-lore: the plant's blue-black autumn berries are mildly toxic if eaten, capable of causing vomiting and digestive upset, so the same woodland plant valued for closing wounds on the skin is not to be eaten itself, a distinction worth stating plainly. In the modern garden Solomon's seal remains valued simply for its quiet elegance, arching stems and hanging bells suited to shade, so that a plant once carrying the authority of a legendary king's ring now serves mostly as an unassuming, well-behaved border perennial.