A Brief History of Thyme and other herbs by Miranda Seymour (John Murray, £9.99).

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

They are all listed here (with not a passing reference to Simon and Garfunkel) along with some not so everyday herbs... mullein (good for piles, warts, coughs, earache, toothache and diarrhoea)... elecampagne (try sucking a piece of the root when travelling by rivers to ward away disease)... butterbur ('a soveraigne medicine against the plague').

Seymour - a novelist, biographer (her latest is Mary Shelley), children's writer and author of a Saturday herb column in The Independent - has put together a potted history of 45 herbs all to be found growing in the wild spaces of Britain.

It's an aide memoire for gardeners and cooks and testimony to the diligence of early civilisations who coaxed the most evil-looking clumps of leaves to yield their mysteries.

How, Seymour wonders, did they discover the singular abilities of each herb - woad to produce its rich, blue dye; sage as a mental stimulant; marjoram as an anti-depressant?

Those she writes about she found as absorbing as characters in one of her novels.

Discover which herb the 72-year-old Queen of Hungary used to extract a proposal from the King of Poland... what counters the detrimental effects of chemotherapy, which to use to stun fish, or even wear as underwear.

Seymour's favourites remain comfrey (it has a legendary power to cure all ills) and tansy (a better insecticide you won't find in a can).

And then of course, there's Indian hemp, which George Washington urged his gardener to sow everywhere and Victoria smoked. Catch a President of the United States or a queen regnant doing that nowadays with a plant we have come to love and know as cannabis... but it can also be made into cloth, rope, shoes, fuel and is also a remedy for dry skin.

Odd facts, strange remedies all abound here.

There's medicinal lore, gardening magic and culinary titbits; all wonderfully researched by Seymour and beautifully illustrated by her cousin Jane Macfarlane's line drawings.

David Chapman