One of my ancestors was a witch.  No - not someone mumbling curses in a pointy hat - she was the village "wise woman" of her day, making potions and lotions from herbs and god-knows what-all, consulted by the country people who couldn't afford doctors.

I don't know if her potions did any good; what I do know is that she never passed on her knowledge and skills, so that when she died, she left a stillroom full of mysterious bottles and ointments, none of which were known to her descendants.  So, for safety's sake, they discarded the lot.

This present book is about that lost knowledge.  It is not a herbal, but an attempt to record objectively the plants used in folk (as opposed to official) medicine.  It is arranged like a flora, with classified entries according to famiy, sorted by botanical and (some of) the common names, plus geographical distribution.  Some plants are accompanied by line drawings, and there are  excellent colour plates, but the focus is not on identification but on uses and the sources for the uses.  The authors have spent some 16 years collecting and collating the extensive lists of references, and aim to be as exhaustive as possible.  A worthy aim, but an impossible one, given the multiplicity of surviving sources, many of which exist only as papers in obscure county histories or local archives.

The authors are scrupulously objective in reporting all discoverable mentions of these plant remedies popular culture, and I found it an interesting read, but did find myself wondering exactly who would use it.  It's neither a compendium of recipes (of which many survive, in MSS and in print) nor a comprehensive history of herbal medicines, since it excludes "official" sources: both pharmacopoeias (such as Turner, Gerard, or Culpeper), and botanical studies such as Ray's History of Plants through to Geoffrey Grigson. Nor does it make much use of modern developments, either to support or to disprove claims made for the applications cited.

But this is to condemn the authors for not succeeding in what they evidently didn't set out to do.  As a record of a fast-vanishing store of medical knowledge, it is to be applauded.