MARLENE McCARTY
INTO THE WEEDS: SEX & DEATH

Sex Garden

Actaea racemosa
Black cohosh

In the 1870s, the standard treatment for severe menstrual cramps was surgery to remove the ovaries. Forty percent of all patients died, and women, skeptical of male doctors, began concocting herbal remedies. In her Massachusetts home in 1873, Lydia Pinkham combined wild roots and herbs—black cohosh, a main ingredient—to help women control their reproductive health. Black cohosh promotes menstruation, soothes menstrual pain and eases menopause. The Haudenosaunee and Cherokee, having long known the benefits of this buttercup species, likely introduced it to European colonists. An Algonquian term, cohosh means “rough” for the herb’s dark, knotted rhizome. These underground stems contain compounds (triterpene glycosides and fukinolic acid) with estrogen-like effects. A few drops under the tongue relax uterine muscles and induce abortion.

Nicknamed bugbane, bugwort, black baneberry, black snakeroot and rheumatism weed, this herb is also lethal. Its analgesic salicylates cause everything from vomiting and tinnitus to hyperthermia and organ failure. Wild harvested, black cohosh is so popular it is considered “at-risk” across the United States and endangered in Illinois and Massachusetts. Though an age-old remedy for dangerous ailments and treatments, now the endangered plant itself needs protection.

Anethum graveolens  
Dill

Foeniculum vulgare
Fennel

Hippocrates made a mouthwash of Dill. Both Charlemagne and New World Puritans utilized Dill to calm noisy stomachs. As he despised burps and hiccoughs, Charlemagne required Dill oil be served to all his dinner guests. Devout Americans fed their children “meetinghouse seeds” to calm stomach growls and suppress appetites during six-hour religious services.

In addition to being a wonderful host plant for butterflies, Dill and Fennel have been used for antibacterial, antifungal, anti-inflammatory and anti-diabetic properties for millennia. Dill was listed as a painkiller component in the Ebers papyrus from 1,500 BCE while Fennel was discovered among personal chattel salvaged from the Egyptian Pharaoh’s tombs.

Dill and Fennel belong to the same family, Apiacae, which they share with Queen Anne’s Lace. Both produce feathery leaves (Dill’s slightly wider), umbels of yellow flowers (Fennel’s more golden), and small flat seeds (Fennel’s are grooved).

Ancient Egyptians used Dill to ward off witches, a custom passed down to the Europeans. In the Middle Ages, a witch who found herself in the presence of Dill would be taken by an overwhelming compulsion to count Dill leaves, counting and recounting continuously until the first light of dawn, when the witch had to disappear. In Denmark, on Walpurgis Night and on St. John’s Day, cattle were fed with Dill and Garlic to protect against witchcraft and to guarantee a large yield of milk. Dill water has been used by women for centuries to increase milkflow and calm colicky babies. Uterine contractions, miscarriage or premature labor can be induced by the use of Dill.

With an estrogenic effect fennel seeds promote menstruation, ease dysmenorrhea, alleviate symptoms of menopause and peri-menopause and increase libido. Its essential oils can be used both as an emmenagogue and a galactagogue. Made into a salve or crème, Fennel is effective against Hirsutism in women. As Fennel protects mucous membranes it can reduce vaginal symptoms caused by menopausal changes to the vaginal lining. Containing powerful compounds called monoterpenes, Dill seems to prevent carcinogenesis at both the initial stage and the progression stage. 

Artemisia vulgaris
Mugwort

In twenty-first-century America, drinking mugwort tea to terminate a pregnancy is grounds for jail time. Seven states have outlawed self-managed abortion, and forty laws nationwide could criminalize it. In 2004, a South Carolinian migrant mother of three was sentenced to jail for taking an abortifacient. Even an herbal abortion using mugwort—one of an estimated 525 abortifacient plants worldwide—could be a punishable crime. But the herb grows along roadsides and wastelands. Considered invasive, it spreads via rhizomes.

Mugwort, sometimes an umbrella term for similar Artemisia species, is native to Europe, Asia and North Africa. The pointed, sage-scented leaves contain eucalyptol, which targets umbilical cells and causes the uterine lining to shed. Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Indian medicine have used it for reproductive health. For over 10,000 years, the Chumash have used California mugwort, what they call molush, to promote menstruation and regulate hormonal flux in menopause. Mugwort is considered safer than traditional hormone replacement therapy.

This bitter herb is popular in cooking (especially mugwort soup), though it contains thujone, a lethal psychoactive convulsant. Inhaling what Russians call zabytko, meaning “forgetfulness,” induces lucid dreaming. Placing the stalks under a pillow while sleeping intoxicates the mind and memory. The herb also heals the body. In Chinese medicine, moxibustion—mugwort heat therapy—treats colds, inflammation and spasms. Still burned as incense in pagan rituals, mugwort was invoked in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm: “Remember, Mugwort, what you revealed, / what you established at the mighty proclamation.” Spreading head to toe and body to mind, mugwort’s powers are rhizomatic, too.

Cicuta maculata
Water hemlock

Water hemlock is a trickster: it looks like parsley, tastes like wild parsnip and smells like a carrot. As the deadliest plant in North America and member of the parsley family, the weed has poisoned children who used the red-spotted stems for whistles, peashooters and snorkels. One of its names is children’s bane; another is cowbane, (“bane” itself means “poison.”) The tuberous roots deceive animals, too. Just one bite can kill a cow. Each year water hemlock and other toxic weeds poison livestock across America.

Found in marshy meadows, fields and parking lots, water hemlock is native to North America. The Cicuta genus contains cicutoxin, which paralyzes the central nervous system, causing vomiting, diarrhea, kidney failure, heart irregularities, seizures and death. Muscle convulsions are severe enough to dislocate bones. The very toxin that kills also prolongs life, fighting cancer with antileukemia and antitumor properties. Native Americans have long harnessed water hemlock’s potency. The Klamath of the Pacific Northwest tipped their hunting arrows in its juice. The Haudenosaunee used hemlock as a narcotic and disinfectant and elder trees’ bark as its antidote. To become sterile, Cherokee women chewed on its roots for four days in a row. Not only a contraceptive, the parsley family has been used for centuries to stifle male desire and prevent erections. As Ovid wrote, “Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, / It mocked me, hung down the head and sunk.” 

Convallaria majalis
Lily of the Valley

Lily of the Valley can manipulate human sperm cells. Known for centuries as an aphrodisiac, Convallaria majalis contains bourgeonal, an ingredient used in perfumery. Studying in-vitro tests, the Forschungszentrum Jülich with Bonn-based researchers found bourgeonal can mimic progesterone and serve as a chemo-attractant -- causing human sperm to swim twice as fast. The olfactive receptor OR1D2 is found in our nose and in sperm. Both bourgeonal and progesterone can activate sperm’s OR1D2 receptors opening calcium ion channels and increasing their speed.

In early twentieth-century France, Lily of the Valley was traditionally sold on May Day. The day was thus christened: La Fête du Muguet. In 1906, perfumer Guerlain, perhaps hearkening to the flowers popularity, created the beloved fragrance Muguet. This first perfume in the lineage of the modern white floral was rivaled only by Muguet des Bois created by Henri Robert for Coty in 1936. The wildly adored Lily of the Valley remained part of the good girl’s olfactory repertoire until 1956 when the master Edmond Roudnitska created Diorissimo for Dior. Reconsidering traditional femininity with a new erotic disposition, Dior’s virginal Muguet added a touch of civet in the background, creating a sophisticated sweet girl aroma that was also a little bit dirty. Dior himself, insanely superstitious, sewed sprigs of Muguet into the hems of his early dresses for luck. All his early fragrances were constructed around this flower.

This vestal plant is also called Our Lady’s Tears or Mary’s Tear.  It is a symbol of humility in religious painting and a sign of Christ's second coming. The plant with the tiny droplet bells and red berries sprang either from the tears wept by the Virgin Mary during the crucifixion of Jesus or from Eve's tears after her expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Defying its virginal and ladylike image this member of the asparagus family, only masquerading as a lily, is deadly. Just a bite causes headaches, hot flashes, hallucinations, irritability, and red blotches on cold clammy skin. Even the water from a bouquet contains deadly traces of the glycoside convallatoxin. Containing at least thirty-eight cardiac glycosides, steroids specifically affecting the heart, death by Lily of the Valley might look like a heart attack.

Daucus carota
Queen Anne’s lace

For centuries, women have passed on contraceptive knowledge of Queen Anne’s lace. They still do, especially in regions like Appalachia where reproductive rights are under attack. In North Carolina, a woman kept a mason jar of its seeds to take after intercourse, which worked for ten years until she only once forgot and got pregnant. Queen Anne’s lace is a progesterone inhibitor, working like the birth control pill and morning-after pill. Swallowing one spoonful of seeds causes a “slippery” uterus, so a fertilized egg can’t implant. Hippocrates wrote the earliest account of it as birth control nearly 2,500 years ago.

The tiny, white flowers gather like a parasol. Together with the leaves, they resemble relatives in the parsley family: wild parsnip, parsley and deadly hemlock, many of which are poisonous. A tiny red dot at the bloom’s center helps distinguish it and gives rise to its name. Native to Europe and Asia, the plant is linked to Queen Anne of England (1655-1714), who, legend has it, pricked her finger while sewing the finest lace. Others say Saint Anne, patron saint of lace makers, inspired the name.

European colonists brought the edible wild carrot with them to America, perhaps for women to control their fertility. The wind carried its seeds, overtaking grasslands and prairies as a ubiquitous weed, though knowledge of its contraceptive properties is not as widespread. Now, with the reinstated Title X restrictions of 2019, keeping contraceptive plant knowledge alive is not simply oral history; it is revolt.

Galium aparine
Cleavers

The galium aparine’s ability to cleave onto itself makes it ideal bedding material. Its clinging hairs cause the branches to stick together, thus ensuring a lofty mattress. One of a half dozen plants known as bedstraws, the stem’s tiny teeth easily latch onto clothing and fur, thus “cleavers.”

Before the Christian Church assimilated local myths and customs into one dominant Christian mythology, medieval birth was an Earth-Mother ritual. The midwife would prepare a bed of fragrant flowers and herbs woven into a base of cleavers ensuring a good birth and plentiful flow of milk. The earthy aromas pulled the laboring mother under to her earth goddess. Europe was awash in a multitude of them: Frau Holle (Germanic), Freya (Norse), Huldra (Scandinavian) and countless others. Dedicated to such goddesses, the childbed provided support, protection and a sense of security. Cleavers calms inflammation of the nerves, lymph, and urinary tract by flushing out toxins, decreasing congestion and reducing swelling.

At the time, midwives and wise-women (witches) were the local health practitioners, keepers of a subcultural knowledge of plant medicine. In 742 CE, the Synod of Liftinae attempted to obliterate all pagan customs, forbidding the ritual of the goddess and childbed. However, women dissented. They found ways to keep their connection to the earth and plants by claiming their bedstraw was created from the same herbs used for Jesus in the Bethlehem manger. The childbed became known as Our Lady’s Bedstraw, Mary’s Bed or The Virgin’s Bedstraw.

Thirty to sixty thousand Europeans were burned at the stake for witchcraft between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the vast majority of them female. Witch healers, midwives and herbalists were the unlicensed doctors of Western history, often the only healthcare for folk bitterly afflicted by poverty and disease. The witch-craze was a campaign of terror by the church and ruling class against female peasants who represented a political, religious and sexual threat. The medieval church came to control medical education and practice. Then, as today, control of medicine determined who would get care, who could afford care, who would live and who would die. Medical science did not increase women’s chances of survival in childbirth until the twentieth century. More recently, Western medicine has not proved a boon for women’s health in the US. Along with Serbia we are the only developed nations seeing increasing maternal mortality rates. Over the last two decades they’ve been rising, particularly for black Americans who die three times as often as white women in childbirth. 

While cleavers cannot fix a health crisis, its promises of care and safety are still profound. Humans have not been the only species to use cleavers. In spring, when a doe gives birth, she also prefers cleavers’ lush, billowy growth. It makes a comfortable bed and its fragrance disguises deer scent protecting both mother and fawn from predators. First Nation hunters adopted it too as protection, using bedstraw on their clothing to mask human scent. Some Southeastern First Nations considered cleavers to be “Deer Medicine.”

Asclepias syriaca
Common milkweed

The female monarch butterfly lays her eggs exclusively on milkweed. The plant is the only food the caterpillars will eat. Immune to the plant’s toxic, sticky, white sap, they accumulate the poison in their bodies, protecting them from predators. Over the last two decades though, the Eastern monarch population has plummeted by ninety percent, due to mega-farm herbicide spraying and development. Together they’ve destroyed some 165 million acres of milkweed breeding habitat in the United States. The only species of butterfly to make a round-trip migration akin to birds, it flies up to 3000 miles to twelve mountaintops in Mexico. Along the entire migration route, milkweed has disappeared. In Mexico, logging and avocado crops threaten their habitat. In January 2020, Mexican monarch conservationist Homero Gómez González went missing. His body was found two weeks later, a further setback to the butterfly’s preservation.

During World War II, milkweed was adopted for the war effort. “Pick a Weed Save a Life” became the milkweed’s motto. Posters boasted its benefits as the tufted seeds were used to stuff life preservers. An entire industry sprang up in one Michigan county where children harvested the seedpods. Just under two pounds of milkweed down could keep a 150-pound person afloat.  

First Nations peoples have used milkweed for millennia. Centuries before the Swedish botanist Linnaeus named the milkweed genus for the Greek god of medicine, more than 500 unique names already existed for the plant in the Americas. From the Mayan site of Copan in Honduras to ancient Mound Builders sites in the north, archeologists have found milkweed. In present-day Ohio, remnants of a milkweed fiber fishing net were found at a prehistoric site dating to 300 BCE. Mound Builders used the rot-resistant fibers for weaving mats, tying moccasins, stringing pearls, hunting lures, and making flutes and bird whistles as well as a red dye. Milkweed’s powerful plant medicine has been used for centuries. The Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw and Chitimacha inhaled the vapors to relieve asthma and respiratory ailments. Rappahannock and Schaghticoke tribes pounded the roots as a remedy for snakebites, bee stings and spider bites. Contraceptives have combined milkweed roots with jack in the pulpit.    

Different species of the asclepias genus worldwide exhibit similar medicinal properties. The roots of asclepias tomentosa and the milkweed tree asclepias procera contain potent abortifacients. From the Sudan to the African peoples of Sukuma, Mkalama, and the Maasai, to  Ghana, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as well as North America, women and healers have recognized the milkweed plant as a powerful natural gift permitting women to control their own bodies.

Gossypium hirsutum
Cotton

Mary Gaffney, an enslaved Texan woman born in 1846, chewed cotton root to keep from bearing children. “Maser was going to raise him a lot more slaves, but still I cheated Maser, I never did have any slaves to grow and Maser he wondered what was the matter.” Freed at twenty, she and her husband went on to have five children. After the US withdrew from the international slave trade in 1808, slavery continued only by enforced reproduction. Black women and girls, familiar with the Gossypium species in Africa, used cotton root to prevent pregnancy. On one Tennessee plantation, black women gave birth to only two infants over a twenty-five-year span.

Cotton is medicinal. Its roots, leaves and seeds treat pain, urinary problems and menstrual disorders, whereas its oil is a male contraceptive in Chinese medicine. Gossypol, the toxic principle of the seeds, decreases sperm production and induces abortion. Enslaved men in the South may have also used the root for birth control.

Though cotton was a crop of oppression, African Americans transformed it into resistance. In the late nineteenth century, black cotton farmers and sharecroppers formed the Colored Farmers’ Alliance (CFA) to dismantle railroads, merchants, brokers and banks that charged exorbitant fees and interest rates. Disenfranchised by segregation, the CFA organized strikes and trainings to promote economic self-sufficiency and wrest control of “king cotton.”

Hedeoma pulegiodes
Pennyroyal

In 1978, an 18-year-old Colorado woman died after drinking pennyroyal oil to end her pregnancy. The amount she’d taken was equivalent to 50 gallons of pennyroyal tea. The mint-like leaves are safe to eat, but the oil contains high concentrations of a toxin that causes liver failure. A midwife would know this. Since antiquity, women have used pennyroyal and its mint family members as birth control. Until 1931, pennyroyal was considered contraceptive medicine in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia—the compendia of federally-mandated quality standards for all medicines. Since legal abortions are becoming harder to get, women are searching for herbal information online—more than 200,000 Google searches related to self-abortion in one month of 2017 alone.

With names like tickweed, pudding grass, run-by-the-ground and lurk-in-the-dirt, the plant includes two common mints: American and European pennyroyal. The leaves contain the toxin pulegone, which targets the liver and uterus. The symptoms of being “pennyroyaled” are so prevalent in Northern Ireland, where abortion is illegal, that they served as a plot point in Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman. The narrator shows symptoms of poisoning, and her mother suspects the abortifacient. While women in Northern Ireland await the 2019 decision to legalize women’s right to choose, being pennyroyaled remains on the table.

Leonurus cardiaca
Motherwort

“Grannie” was the name bestowed on women healers and midwives by African Americans, Native Americans and settlers alike, and grannies all turned to the herb still often simply called “mother,” that is, motherwort. It is so powerful that by 1200 CE, it had spread from Asia to Europe and then onto England, where it was used by and for women. It also traveled to Africa where Zulu, Shona, Xhosa, Lunyaneka and Sotho peoples knew it as an abortifacient. Just how it got to the Americas is unknown, but many women probably carried it—and its secrets. Here, information about it spread among “grannies.”

Southern plantations used enslaved women’s pregnancies as an economic imperative. It was the way the Master increased his “holdings,” and rape was condoned to ensure births. Secrecy surrounded all herbs—like motherwort—with abortive properties. Its active ingredients, leonurine and stachydrine, promote uterine contractions, which could cause abortion, and ease birth pains. The plant has many other healing properties as well, in menopause, with PMS, and as a heart regulator. But, in the early US, where female reproduction was subject to the Master’s strict patriarchal control and abuse, “mother” was a tool to fight enslavement. Oppression breeds rebellion.

Oenothera biennis
Evening primrose

Another plant in the female reproductive healthcare arsenal, Oenothera biennis is employed by American midwives during the last month of pregnancy to stimulate cervical ripening. Therapeutically taken for relief of premenstrual discomfort including tension and bloating, this night-blooming plant alleviates breast pain (mastalgia).

Evening star, sundrop, weedy evening primrose, German rampion, king's cure-all, the plant is native to eastern and central North America. The Cherokee, Haudenosaunee, Ojibwe and Potawatomi would eat it. The nutty-flavored roots can be consumed raw or cooked like potatoes. The flowers themselves are edible and sweet. The Cherokee heated the plant's root and applied it to hemorrhoids. The Haudenosaunee used it in as a skin salve. The leaves are rich in quercetin, with the highest amount in any plant, making it a powerful antihistamine, anti-cancer and anti-estrogenic. Its psychoactive seeds have been found in Puerto Rican ancient ceremonial sites where they were used for ritual purposes.

Origanum vulgare
Oregano / Marjoram 

For centuries, the classification Origanum vulgare has variously been identified as either Oregano or Marjoram. From North Africa to Greece and from Portugal to the North American Colonies, this plant’s ability to interfere with human fertility has long been acknowledged. Dioscorides recommended Marjoram for birth control as well as an emmenagogue and abortifacient. Due to its powerful bacteria- and fungi-killing properties as well as its use as a painkiller and anti-inflammatory, Medieval Midwives incorporated the herb into Our Lady’s Bedstraw used in childbirth. (see Hemp Agrimony). The oil treats lactation-related Candida infections of the nipples and also kills lice.

Contemporary technology has revealed Marjoram exhibits antigonadotropic activity, inhibiting both ovulation in women and the creation of sperm in men. Antigonadotropins are used to treat hormonally-sensitive cancers, delay precocious puberty and puberty in transgender youth, and to treat estrogen-associated conditions such as abnormally heavy menstrual flow and endometriosis. High-dose antigonadotropin therapy has been referred to as medical castration.

Petroselinum crispum
Parsley

Woman Dies After Using Parsley to Induce Miscarriage, First Death Since Argentina Senate Rejected Abortion Bill….NEWSWEEK 2018. An Argentinian woman died after attempting to induce a miscarriage using parsley tea. In Argentina, abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or when a person's life is in danger. In response Senator Eduardo Aguilar remarked: There might not be a law, but abortions will continue, and if it's without a law, the woman's life is at risk. Finally, a bill to legalize abortion up to fourteen weeks was passed in January 2021.

In May 2019, Texas legislature changed the state’s abortion law. Previous state law prohibited abortions after twenty weeks, with certain exceptions, such as when the pregnancy was not viable or the fetus had "severe and irreversible" abnormalities. Senate Bill 1033 did away with those exceptions criminalizing doctors and forcing women to endure traumatic and ill-fated pregnancies. Immediately after the law changed, the Southwestern Women’s Surgery Center saw an increase in patients who had tried to end their pregnancy at home. That week, a doctor found parsley in a patient's vagina.

In ancient times, Midwives or Wise-women Witches would have counseled a woman concerning usage of Petroselinum crispum. Sacred to Venus and Aphrodite, it was used to bring on labor contractions, as an abortifacient, and to reduce a mother’s milk production helping to wean a child. During the Medieval Witch-hunts medicine became an institution of the church and state and women were banned from the role of Doctor. This centuries-long norm held strong until deep into the twentieth century. Women’s bodies have been legislated by men for centuries.

Parsley reduces inflammations, contains histamine inhibitors and is a free radical scavenger. Volatile oil components inhibit tumor formation in animal studies, particularly in the lungs, qualifying it as a "chemoprotective” food that neutralizes carcinogens from cigarette and grill smoke. Other members of the Apiaceae family including carrot, celery, fennel, parsnip, and parsley contain polyynes, a class of organic compounds that exhibit cytotoxic effects.

Ricinus communis
Castor bean

Abrus precatorius
Rosary pea

In 2014, British woman Kuntal Patel laced her abusive mother’s Diet Coke with abrin, a lethal toxin that she bought on the dark web with Bitcoin. Abrin, from rosary pea, and a similar toxin ricin, from castor bean, are both considered bioterrorism agents. They assassinate by toxalbumin poisoning: multiorgan failure for which there is no antidote—at least none yet revealed to the public.

Both plants are native to the Eastern hemisphere: rosary pea from India and Asia, and castor bean from East Africa, India and the Mediterranean. Most rosary pea seeds are red and black like ladybugs and come from legume pods. The black and white ones are mistaken for castor bean seeds, which come from prickly pods. Both have been used for millennia in traditional medicine, from ancient Egyptian medical treatises in 1550 BCE up to the present day in parts of Africa, India and China.

Before scientists isolated the toxins in castor bean and rosary pea, women knew their uterine effects. Recommended by the fourth-century Greek midwife Aspasia and used in South Africa and by the Navajo, castor bean oil, roots and seeds (without the deadly hull) have prevented and ended pregnancies. Women in parts of Africa and India have used rosary pea roots and powdered seeds as an oral contraceptive and abortifacient. But today, ordering these toxic seeds might alarm the authorities.

Rosa
Rose

The Rose carries a deep history. A Rose fossil found in the Florissant Fossil Beds in Florissant, Colorado dates to 55 million years ago. Over twenty naturally occurring species are spread through North America. Garden cultivation of roses began 5,000 years ago, in China.

Its thorns represent the pain of love. The Rose was a favorite of Aphrodite. Distraught after the death of Adonis, she ran barefoot through the woods slicing her feet on the thorns of a white Rose, forever turning Roses red. During the Roman Empire Roses were grown extensively in the Middle East. Roman dining featured wreaths of Roses for their sweet scent while Rose pudding was served to kindle love affairs. To woo Marc Antony, Cleopatra carpeted her floor with Rose petals, much like we carpet the floor at modern weddings.

In 794, Charlemagne required every estate to grow the Rose. Thus, the Rose acclimated to Europe. During the fifteenth century, rival factions of the House of Plantagenet (one represented by a red Rose and the other by a white Rose) went to war over the English throne. The War of the Roses eliminated the male lines of both the Lancaster and York families. An issue of human survival, procreation has historically been a concern of the church and state. Aphrodisiacs insured both male and female potency. Brimming with aphrodisiac properties, the Rose has been an important player in human procreation. The sweet, spicy, floral fragrance boosts the libido, evokes romance, encourages relaxation as well as reducing symptoms of erectile dysfunction and disinterest in sexual activity. Used in aromatherapy Rose oil acts to balance female hormones and stimulate hormone secretions—triggering menstruation while easing cramps, nausea, fatigue and pain associated with menstruation or Post-Menopausal Syndrome.

Less familiar are the Rose’s medicinal properties. Rose tea cleans the blood while strengthening the heart and nervous system. A tea made of white wine and Rose petals can cure exhaustion or relieve uterine cramps. Rosehip tea made from the seedpods is high in Vitamin C, soothing coughs and colds; rosehips also make a fine jam.

Ruta graveolens
Rue

On their wedding day, Lithuanian brides receive a pot of rue from their mothers because of the herb’s contraceptive properties. European apothecaries once sold rue oil to “bringeth down the menses.” After colonists brought the herb to America, enslaved women used it. Their refusal to bear children hindered the economy of human capital, which depended on forced procreation. The name rue—from the Greek reuo, meaning “to set free”—suggests the plant’s power.

Fern-like with yellow flowers, rue originates in the Balkan Peninsula. In gardens, the plant’s bitter scent deters unwanted insects and animals, though the shrub is more commonly found along roadsides and fields. Rutin is the glycoside responsible for its aroma and uterine effects. Rue can also be lethal—it’s all in the intention. As Ophelia proclaims, “There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me… O’ you must wear your rue with a difference.”

This herb of grace—or witchbane, herbygrass and mother of herbs—was a poison antidote and ingredient in Four Thieves Vinegar, which criminals used to stave off the black death while stealing from the sick. The European basilisk, the giant mythological serpent whose breath alone wilted plants and cracked stones, had no effect on rue—perhaps a hint at rue’s effect on men. It immobilizes sperm and decreases libido. A contraceptive for all genders: freeing, but toxic to unrestrained masculinity.

Tanacetum vulgare
Tansy

From the Greek word athanasia, meaning immortality, tansy was one of the aromatic herbs gathered for use in Our Lady’s Bedstraw, the medieval site of childbirth and postpartum confinement. The midwife was aware of the plant’s powers concerning female reproduction. Tansy could stop heavy bleeding and drive out the afterbirth. Used to restore menstrual flow, it was also known for its ability to induce abortion. In later years, enslaved African women of the Antebellum South were familiar with tansy as a menstrual pain reliever. Toxic to internal parasites, tansy tea has been prescribed for centuries to kill and expel worms. The plant’s volatile oil is high in thujone, a substance found in absinthe as well as mugwort. Used to treat jaundice, tansy was called "yellow medicine” by the northern Cheyenne of Montana. In the wilds of the American continent, white settler colonialists wrapped corpses in tansy to retard decay. In the nineteenth century, the plant became so common as a funeral wreath that people began to shun its flowers because of the associations with death. It’s a powerful insecticide though, and the leaves were used to ward off flies, ants and fleas from uncooked meat, keeping it fresh longer. Recent studies have found tansy’s oils to be strong tick and mosquito repellents. Tansy has also been called bitter buttons, golden buttons, and cow bitter.

Vitex agnus-castus
Chaste tree

Chaste tree is an antidote to toxic masculinity. For thousands of years, priests and monks prevented erections by eating its leaves, flowers and berries, dubbing it the monk’s pepper. As chastisement for unrestrained teen hormones, Spartans flogged adolescent boys with chaste tree twigs. The shrub’s potency is in its volatile oils, which stimulate the pituitary gland to increase progesterone thereby suppressing the male libido.

A member of the verbena family, chaste tree is called vitex, wild lavender, chasteberry, Abraham’s balm, cloister pepper and hemp tree. Originating in the Mediterranean and Asia, this herb is not only a libido inhibitor, but also stops sperm from implanting. By regulating estrogen, progesterone and prolactin, chaste tree inhibits conception and causes abortion. Women have long used the aromatic shrub to control fertility. In the ancient festival of Demeter, women lounged on chaste tree branches. How fitting that a symbol of female sexuality quells unrestrained virility.

— Lune Ames, Jennifer Kabat, Marlene McCarty

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