Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

According to the two thousand year old Doctrine of Signatures, medicinal plants were thought to resemble the area of the body for which they would be useful. Later  Christian writers  agreed with the idea, thinking that God would have wanted to show Man what each plant could be used for. The ovate, spotted leaves of Pulmonaria Officinalis, commonly known as Lungwort, symbolised diseased lungs and was used in traditional herbal medicine to help pulmonary ailments simply because of its appearance.

As is often the case, the ancient herbalists were not so far wrong as one might expect, and today Lungwort is used in cough medicines and to treat asthma, tuberculosis and other pulmonary, digestive and renal ailments.

I  just love them for their fragile pink flowers that cycle through soft lavenders and blues as they age, with each cluster being an opalescent pastel bouquet in early spring.