Vervain spent millennia as a sacred herb before settling into flower beds
Egyptians called vervain the tears of Isis, Greeks later named it for Hera, and Romans laid it on Jupiter's altars. Across much of Europe its names still link it to iron. Today the same genus mostly fills sunny borders and draws butterflies, hawk-moths and hummingbirds.
Verbena contains about 150 species of annual and perennial plants, herbaceous or partly woody, most of them native to the Americas and Asia. The type species, common vervain, is European. Leaves grow in opposite pairs and are often thickly hairy, while the small five-petalled flowers crowd into dense spikes, typically blue but also white, pink or purple. Genetic work splits the genus into a diploid North American branch and a polyploid South American one, both built on seven chromosomes, and the European species descends from the northern branch. Chloroplast genes have jumped at least twice from vervains into the related mock vervains, apparently without ordinary hybridisation.
Gardeners value the plants because they shrug off drought, like sun and ask only for decent drainage. Garden verbena and purpletop vervain are the most common, though some kinds cannot take frost and are grown as bedding annuals. The hybrids Silver Anne and Sissinghurst hold the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. One drawback is that cultivated plants can host sweet potato whitefly and pass it to nearby crops.
Folklore clings to the plant. Pliny the Elder mocked the Magi for insisting that anyone gathering it trace an iron circle around it first, and names like the German Eisenkraut and Hungarian vasfű, meaning iron herb and iron grass, echo that link. A Christian legend held that it staunched Christ's wounds, earning it names like holy herb and, in Wales, Devil's bane. The Wiccan writer Doreen Valiente tied its flowers to Diana, Romani tradition uses it for love and luck, and the Pawnee adopted the introduced species in dream divination.
Its oil, sold as Spanish verbena oil, ranks below lemon verbena's in perfumery. Victorians gave the flower a double meaning of enchantment and sensibility.
Source: Verbena
