Plant Overview
A British native and a graceful plant with finely cut ferny leaves and broad flat heads of white flowers in late spring and early summer. The leaves and seeds are aniseed-scented.
Traditionally grown near the kitchen door, where its prettily divided fern-like leaves were at hand for sweetening tart fruit.
The stems and roots are sweet tasting and have historically been used to fend off plague and to fortify against age. The seeds were also used to polish floors and impart a myrrh-like aroma to the establishment.
From Gerard's Herball (first printed 1597):
It is used very much among the Dutch people in a kinde of Loblolly or hotchpot which they do eat, called Warmus. The leaves of sweet Chervill are exceeding good, wholesome and pleasant among other sallad herbs, giving the taste of Anise seed unto the rest.
The seeds eaten as a sallad whiles they are yet green, with oile, vineger, and pepper, exceed all other sallads by many degrees, both in pleasantnesse of taste, sweetnesse of smell, and wholsomnesse for the cold and feeble stomacke. The roots are likewise most excellent in a sallad, if they be boiled and afterwards dressed as the cunning Cooke knoweth how better than my selfe: notwithstanding I use to eat them with oile and vineger, being first boiled; which is very good for old people that are dull and without courage: it rejoiceth and comforteth the heart, and increaseth their lust and strength.
Height x Spread: 1.5m x 90cm
Common name(s): Sweet Cicely, British Myrrh, Sweet Bracken, Sweet Chervil, Wild Anise, Sweet Fern
Photo: Hectonichus, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
