Welsh Journals

BOTANICAL EXPLORATION IN CARDIGANSHIRE. THE early ancestors of man certainly knew, and probably utilised, practically all the important cereal and legume food plants which, in much improved strains and varieties, we use today. In addition, in the preparation of brews, poultices or purgatives primitive" man used other plants which had remedial properties. These he found out by the simple process of trial and error. Thus man's initiation into the vegetable kingdom was an acquaintance often begotten of necessity or of suspicion, but out of it came a considerable early knowledge of plants. The first botanists were almost certainly medical men, the old herbalists, who relied so much upon plants for their remedies. In the recent war years, faced with the task of winning much of our food and other supplies from the wilderness, some of us may have appreciated the achievements of the herbalists and gardeners of the past. The presence in the county of the ruins of the Abbey of Strata Florida serves to remind us that, when they functioned, these buildings were not only seats of learning, but also centres of healing, making use of plants which the monks collected or cultivated near at hand. Doubt- less the cottagers were encouraged to cultivate some of the commoner herbs and there can have been few gardens without Wormwood, Fennel, Lungwort and Tansy, and these plants persist even today either in the old gardens or nearby, as escapes from earlier cultiv- ation. The basic herbal consulted during these Middle Ages was that of Pedanios Dioscorides, a native of Anazarbos in Cilicia, who lived in the 1st century A.D. He was a learned physician and his writings described about 600 plants, which were later pictured, and gave us what was probably the first illustrated herbal. For 1,500 years this herbal was the bible of European medical botany. It describes not merely the part of the plant which was used, but also the root, stem, leaf and usually the flower and habit of growth as well. This herbal, in manuscript form, was not based on any system of classification as we now understand it, but merely on medical, culinary or aromatic properties. During the Middle Ages no medical plant was considered to be genuine unless it could be identified by the descriptive figures in Dioscorides' herbal. When one remembers that these figures were of plants from Asia Minor, it is not difficult to imagine the many unsuccessful attempts at identification of European plants.