Agrimony
Agrimonia Eupatoria. Rose Family.
One or two feet high. Leaves.--Divided into several coarsely toothed leaflets. Flowers.--Small; yellow; in slender spiked racemes. Calyx.--Five-cleft; beset with hooked teeth. Corolla.--Of five petals. Stamens.--Five to fifteen. Pistils.--One to four.
The slender yellow racemes of the agrimony skirt the woods throughout the later summer. In former times the plant was held in high esteem by town physician and country herbalist alike. Emerson longed to know "Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain, and agrimony."
Up to a recent date the plant has been dried and preserved by country people, and might be seen exposed for sale in the shops of French villages. It has also been utilized in a dressing for shoe-leather. When about to flower it yields a pale yellow dye.
Chaucer calls it egremoine. The name is supposed to be derived from the Greek title for an eye-disease, for which the juice of a plant similarly entitled was considered efficacious. The crushed flower yields a lemon-like odor. The small-flowered agrimony, A. parviflora, is found in the woods of New York and New Jersey, also west and southward. Its leaves are divided into from eleven to nineteen deeply cut leaflets, with smaller lance-shaped ones intermixed. Its petals are smaller in the common agrimony, which otherwise it resembles.