garden is honest.

The ingredients thrown into the mystic cauldron by European sorcerers
were in close imitation of those of the ancient alchemists. Moncure
Conway has pointed out that among the ingredients used by English and
Scotch witches were plants gathered, as in Egypt, at certain seasons or
phases of the moon. Chief among such plants were rue and vervain. The
Druids called vervain the 'Holy herb,' and gathered it when the dog-star
rose, placing a sacrifice of honey in the earth from which they removed
it.

In old Greece and Rome vervain was sacred to the god of war, and in
Scandinavia it was also sacred to Thor. It was, moreover, carried by
ambassadors of peace, and was supposed to preserve from lightning any
house decorated with it. In later times it was believed that a
decoction of vervain and rue, mixed, had such a remarkable effect on
gun-metal that anyone using a gun over which the liquid had been poured
would shoot 'as straight as a die.' This may be news to our modern
musketry instructors.

Had this belief, one may wonder, anything to do with the special effect
on the eye always supposed to be possessed by rue? Its virtue as an
eye-salve, at any rate, may explain how it came to be regarded as
capable of bestowing the 'second sight.' To this day, in the Tyrol it is
still believed to confer fine vision. If hallucinations were, as Moncure
Conway assumes, the basis of belief in second sight, then we can
understand the reputed virtues of rue in its narcotic qualities. We have
seen how it came to be called 'herb of grace,' yet some think it got
this name through being used in witchcraft by exorcists to try the
devil.

Speculating on why herbs and roots should have been esteemed magical,
Mr. Andrew Lang concludes that it is enough to remember that herbs
really have medicinal properties, and that untutored people invariably
confound medicine with magic. Thus it was easy to suppose that a plant
possessed virtue not only when swallowed, but when carried in the hand.
The same writer examines the theory that rue was the Homeric moly, which
in a former chapter we identified with the mandrake. But Lang rejects
that theory, and says that rue was called 'herb of grace' and was used
for sprinkling holy water because in pre-Christian times it had been
supposed to have effect against the powers of evil. The early
Christians were thus just endeavouring to combine the old charm of rue
with the new potency of holy water.