Mugwort
Artemisia vulgaris
- Roadsides and waste ground
- Silver undersides to the leaves
- Midsummer garlands
Mugwort grows where people walk. It colonises verges, railway sidings, and the scuffed edges of car parks, which is very likely why European folklore attached it to travellers long before anyone wrote the association down. Roman soldiers were said to line their sandals with the leaves against fatigue on the march, a claim repeated so often in later herbals that its actual origin has been lost.
In Anglo-Saxon tradition mugwort opens the Nine Herbs Charm, addressed there as Una, the oldest of herbs. The charm survives in a tenth-century manuscript and is one of the few places where a pre-Christian English plant vocabulary reaches us more or less intact.
Its midsummer associations are the most persistent. Garlands of mugwort were worn at Litha fires across northern Europe and thrown into the flames at the end of the night, carrying the year's ill luck with them.