Rosemary
Salvia rosmarinus
- Evergreen and resinous
- Weddings and wakes
- Dooryard gardens
Rosemary is the herb of memory, and the association is old enough that Ophelia can invoke it in Hamlet without explanation. Mourners carried sprigs to graves and dropped them onto coffins; brides carried the same plant, gilded, down the aisle. One plant, both ends of a life.
Mediterranean in origin, it took to English gardens readily and became a fixture of the dooryard herb patch. Folk practice held that rosemary flourished only where the household was honest, and that where the bush outgrew the gardener the woman of the house held the reins.
Burnt as a fumigant in sickrooms and courtrooms well into the eighteenth century, less for any belief in spirits than for the entirely practical business of masking the smell of a crowd.