Winter’s Tale, iv. 4.
Sound savorie, and bazil, hartie-hale,
Fat Colwortes and comforting Perseline,
Cold Lettuce and refreshing Rosmarine.
Muiopotmos.
Savory, satureia, was once supposed to belong to the satyrs. “Mercury claims the dominion over this herb. Keep it dry by you all the year, if you love yourself and your ease, and it is a hundred pounds to a penny if you do not.” Culpepper follows this advice with a long list of ailments, for all of which this herb is an excellent remedy. Summer savory (S. hortensis) and winter savory (S. Montana) are the only kinds considered in England as a rule, though Gerarde further mentions “a stranger,” which, “because it groweth plentifully upon the rough cliffs of the Tyrrhenian Sea in Italie, called Saint Julian rocke,” is named after the saint, Satureia Sancti Juliani. In other countries summer savory used to be strewn upon the dishes as we strew parsley, and served with peas or beans; rice, wheat and sometimes the dried herb was “boyled among pease to make pottage.” Winter savory used to be dried and powdered and mixed with grated bread, “to breade their meate, be it fish or flesh, to give it a quicker rellish.” Here Parkinson breaks off to deliver a severe reproof to “this delicate age of ours, which is not pleased with anything almost that is not pleasant to the palate,” and therefore neglects many viands which would be of great benefit. Both savories are occasionally used more or less in the way he suggests, winter savory being the favourite. In Cotton’s sequel to the “Complete Angler,” a “handful of sliced horse-radish-root, with a handsome little faggot of rosemary, thyme and winter savoury” is recommended in the directions for “dressing a trout.” One of the virtues attributed to both savories by the old herbalists is still agreed to by some gardeners: “A shoot of it rubbed on wasp or bee stings instantly gives relief.”
Sorrel (Rumex).
Simplest growth of Meadow-sweet or Sorrel
Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave.
Swinburne.
Cresses that grow where no man may them see,
And sorrel, untorn by the dew-claw’d stag;
Pipes will I fashion of the syrinx flag.
Endymion.
There flourish’d starwort and the branching beet
The sorrel acid and the mallow sweet.