By Carina Magyar in Herbs — May 6, 2023

VII: Burnet

When blood spots mean blood death, insect-style.

A budding stalk of salad burnet. Image by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay.

Good morning. Today is septidi, the 17th of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la pimprenelle, a member of the rose family that looks like raspberries on a stick.

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Sir Francis Bacon had theories and philosophies on a great many things, including what smells the best. He has a whole tirade in Of Gardens in which he dismisses roses, bay leaves, and rosemary as useless for perfuming the air, despite their fragrant reputations. For walking past, he made his top 10 list thusly: violet, musk-rose, dead strawberry leaves, dusty vine flowers, sweetbriar, wallflowers, pink stock, gillyflowers, lime blossoms, and honeysuckles. But overall he disdained mere perfuming flowers, preferring, oddly, the herbs he could crush underfoot to make a scent as he stomped about a garden: mint, wild thyme, and (above all) salad burnet. "Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them," he wrote, prescriptively, "to have the pleasure when you walk or tread."

Burnet is associated with blood. Its Latin name – Sanguisorba – translates to "asorbs blood," as its fuzzy flowers were useful bandage liners to encourage clotting. (This also is borne out in its alternate English name, bloodwort.) Its shocking magenta flowers that bob and weave on thin stalks in a breeze resemble blood spots in a field.

And that's likely how the burnet moth got its name. Unlike most butterflies and moths whose plant names originate based on what they like to eat, the burnet moth doesn't eat burnet – it's just covered in red spots that look like droplets of bright, fresh blood on a black cloth. And they look like this because they are stone-cold serial killers.

VII: Burnet

VI: Comfrey

VIII: Basket-of-gold

VI: Comfrey

VIII: Basket-of-gold

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