Lungwort

Overview

Lungwort is one of the most thoroughgoing expressions of the Doctrine of Signatures in the British herbal tradition. The basal leaves — large, rough, dark green, spotted with pale grey-white blotches — were read as a direct correspondence to the mottled appearance of lung tissue, and from this reading flowed centuries of prescription: lungwort for coughs, for bronchitis, for tuberculosis, for every affliction of the breath. The medical value of this correspondence is approximately nothing. The plant does contain mucilaginous compounds with mild soothing action, and its use in respiratory herbal teas is not entirely without basis — but the reasoning was wrong even if the outcome was occasionally useful. In early spring, it produces flowers that open pink and mature to blue in the same cluster, a colour shift caused by changing cell acidity that is one of the more striking botanical phenomena of the hedgerow year.

Botanical Notes

A low perennial, 15–30cm, forming clumps of rough, hairy, elliptic leaves with distinctive pale grey-white spots. Stem leaves narrower, clasping. Flowers in coiled cymes (scorpioid cymes), opening pink and turning blue-violet as they age, giving a single flower head multiple colours simultaneously — a process driven by anthocyanin pigment response to increasing cell pH. Blooms February to May. Found in broadleaved woodland, hedge banks, and shaded gardens throughout Europe, often on calcareous soil. Naturalised in parts of Britain, where it may be native or a very early introduction. Self-seeds freely. Several Pulmonaria species and cultivars are grown as garden plants.

Lore & History

The name Pulmonaria is from the Latin pulmo, lung — the same root as pulmonary. The spotted leaves appear in the herbals from at least the fifteenth century as a signature of the lungs, and the plant was prescribed accordingly across German, English, and Italian folk medicine under various names: lungwort, lungenkraut, herbe aux poumons. Nicholas Culpeper, as ever the most thorough cataloguer of signatures and their applications, recommended it for all chest complaints, hemorrhage in the lungs, and the spitting of blood. That his reasoning was wrong does not diminish the plant's presence in the tradition — lungwort is one of the cases where the doctrine of signatures produced a plant that at least belongs in the right neighbourhood. In the garden, lungwort is valued as a shade-tolerant, early-flowering plant that provides important early pollen and nectar for bumblebees.

Warnings