verbena

In Latin, verbena (plural verbenae) referred to sacred boughs used in religious ceremonies. Roman priests called fetiales carried verbena when negotiating treaties and declaring war. The plant was cut from the Capitol hill's sacred grove and carried as a symbol of inviolability. To hold verbena was to be under divine protection. Pliny the Elder wrote that no plant was held in greater reverence.

The specific plant Romans called verbena was likely Verbena officinalis, a modest, wiry herb with small purple flowers. It looks nothing like a sacred plant. It grows in waste ground and roadsides. But its ordinariness may have been the point — the sacred was hiding in plain sight, growing where anyone could find it.

Medieval herbalists inherited the Roman reverence and amplified it. Verbena became a cure-all: fever, plague, snakebite, witchcraft. The Druids supposedly held it as sacred as mistletoe (though this claim comes from Roman sources, not Celtic ones). In folk medicine, it was called 'herb of the cross' — a legend claimed it had grown at the foot of Calvary and was used to staunch Christ's wounds.

Modern English uses verbena for a genus of about 250 flowering plants and for lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora), a South American species the Spanish brought to Europe in the 1700s. Lemon verbena tea is popular in France (verveine) and Spain (hierbaluisa). The sacred oath-plant of the Roman Senate is now a pleasant herbal infusion. Two thousand years turned a symbol of war and peace into a bedtime drink.