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Gwydion

WOAD!!!

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Here's a question to stump you all.

Does anyone have any Woad? Plants, material, whatever?

I will sell several first-born children for a plant.

Oh, and hope you all had a nice Chrissie. :-)

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I don't have any plants or seeds personally, but Austral Herbs have seeds of Woad ( Isatis tinctoria ) and Chinese Woad ( Isatis indigotica ) for $2.50 per packet. Cheaper than a first-botn child. The Chinese Woad is supposed to have medicinal uses - interesting.

I've ordered from Austral a couple of times and their service is really good.

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Cheers for that, Minotaur.

I'm curious, tho', as to whether 'Isatis' is the same woad that was used in Britain. I've only ever seen it referenced as 'Glastum'.

Anyone know?

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It's the same - Glastum is an old French name for it, and it is the plant used to extract make the blue dye. More details are here

http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/w/...w/woad--28.html

That information is taken from 'A Modern Herbal' by M Grieve. I have a copy of the book and in the entry for Woad the latin name is given as Ivatis tinctoria, but if you look up the index of the book it is listed as Isatis tinctoria (there's no Ivatis). I think the v is a misprint which was copied into the Botanical.com site from the original book.

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minotaur wrote:

"Glastum is an old French name for it"

No, actually it's the old Welsh word for it (well, Ancient Brythonic, actually), which was taken into Latin by the Romans. If it's been used in O. French; well, fair enough.

It's just that i've seen the plant refered to with Glastum as the species name, as well as seen it in the texts that I study (celtic studies).

Ta for the info tho'. That's great!

[This message has been edited by Gwydion (edited 11 January 2002).]

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