ESTEEMED herbalist Nicholas Culpeper wrote in his 1653 treatise that ‘Providence has made the most useful things most common and for that reason we neglect them’. He was making particular reference to one of our most familiar of wild plants, shepherd’s purse, that leggy weed whose modest, but unmistakable white pancake racemes so readily decorate hedgerows, verges, waste ground and field margins.
Today, we certainly neglect shepherd’s purse, but it deserves more than a passing thought. Its name alone should claim our interest. Unusually for a plant, let alone a weed, it carries a double-barrelled Latin classification, , determined by Linnaeus and confirmed by his less-renowned German contemporary Friedrich Medikus, although it was assigned to (cabbage) family by British botanist Gilbert Burnett. It translates directly into the name by which we and the French and Spanish know it—shepherd’s purse, being a small box, a purse and the genitive of pastor, a shepherd.
