Shepherd's delight

A prolific weed, shepherd’s purse has long been taken for granted, but it deserves greater consideration, if only for its medicinal properties

- Ian Morton

ESTEEMED herbalist Nicholas Culpeper wrote in his 1653 treatise that ‘Providence has made the most useful things most common and for that reason we neglect them’. He was making particular reference to one of our most familiar of wild plants, shepherd’s purse, that leggy weed whose modest, but unmistakable white pancake racemes so readily decorate hedgerows, verges, waste ground and field margins.

Today, we certainly neglect shepherd’s purse, but it deserves more than a passing thought. Its name alone should claim our interest. Unusually for a plant, let alone a weed, it carries a double-barrelled Latin classification, Capsella bursa-pastoris, determined by Linnaeus and confirmed by his less renowned German contemporary Friedrich Medikus, although it was assigned to the Brassicaceae (cabbage) family by British botanist Gilbert Burnett. It translates directly into the name by which we and the French and Spanish know it—shepherd’s purse, capsella being a small box, bursa a purse and pastoris the genitive of pastor, a shepherd.

Traditionally, a shepherd’s calling commanded the utmost respect—after dogs, sheep were among the first domesticated animals, the mouflon noted in Mesopotamia from 9000BC or earlier. Many Biblical patriarchs were shepherds: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David. It was hugely symbolic that shepherds were said to be the first witnesses summoned to the Nativity by the heavenly host—‘While shepherds washed their socks by night’, as irreverent choristers used to sing.