Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland by David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Timber Press, £22.50/$29.95, ISBN 0881926388 Reviewed by Roy Ellen
ETHNOBOTANY conjures images of faraway places – unless you live in the Amazon, of course. The term was supposedly coined by John Harshberger in Philadelphia in 1895. In 1919 Michael Moloney published what he called his “ethnobotany” – of Ireland. But by the time the scientific study of ethnobotany was fully established, in the final decades of the 20th century, European folk plant medicines were widely regarded as lost, wholly replaced by synthetic drugs.
Gabrielle…
