The "Basilisk," old books maintain, is a fabulous beast whose icy glare freezes the gazer, and is mortal. Approach her then with a mirror; and courage be your guide!
"Hemlock, Henbane, Adders-tongue." (line 10)
Hemlock is that tall, dim-spotted plant of a sad green colour, and of a scent "strong, heady and bad," which is "very cold and dangerous," especially when "digged in the dark."
Clammy henbane is woolly-leafed, with hollow dark-eyed flowers of a purple-veined dingy yellow. "It lusts to grow in rancid soil, To 'stil its deadly oil."
Moonwort is the meek-looking little flowering fern that has the power to break locks, and to make any horse that chances to tread upon it cast his shoes.
The livid-flowered, cherry like-fruited dwale, enoron, or nightshade is the most "daungerous" plant in England. While leopard's bane—though it bears a bright-yellow daisy-like flower, and witches are said to fear sun-colour—is venomous to animals.
I am uncertain of adder's tongue, for the fern of this name cures sore eyes; and cuckoo-pint which is also so called, is "a remedy for poison and the plague"!
Of these six insidious plants only one is openly mentioned by Shakespeare, and they appear to have few country names, unlike, for example, the purple orchis, "which has so many," says Nicholas Culpeper, "that they would fill a sheet of paper": long-purples, dead-men's fingers, crake-feet, giddy-gandy, neat-legs, geese and goslings, and gander-gooses, being a few choice specimens.