Wellcome uses cookies.

Read our policy
Wellcome Collection homepage
All
Stories
Images
Catalogue
Events
3 results
  • Wild thyme (Thymus praecox): flowers, stems and leaves in various pictures. Watercolour, pencil and pen drawings, 1897.
  • Acinos alpinus (L.) Moench. Lamiaceae. Rock thyme. Small herbaceous perennial. Distribution: C. and S. Europe. This is Mountain wild Basill, Clinopodium alpinum, of Parkinson (1640), the Teucrium Alpinum and Clinopodium Alpinum hirsutum of Bauhin. Then as now, when it has the synonyms Thymus alpinus, Satureja alpina and Calamintha alpina, its nomenclature has been confused. It is unlikely to be the Acinos or Clinopodium of Theophrastus or Disocorides. Dioscorides gives opposing medicinal uses to the plants he knows by these two names, and Parkinson (1640) makes no judgement as to its uses. Reportedly drunk as a tea in Greece, but evidence for it being used historically for fevers is lacking. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Astronomy: a woman walking on a hillside near below Brightling Observatory, East Sussex. Engraving by W.B. Cooke, 1819, after J.M.W. Turner.