(Anonymous)
In olden days when a woman felt faint or hysterical, she was always sent off to lie in a darkened room with a lavender-saturated handkerchief over her face. This use of the herb was documented as early as 1597 in Gerard's Herball. "The distilled water of Lavender smelt unto, or the temples and forehead bathed therewith, is a refreshing to them that have the Catalepsy, a light migram, and to them that have the falling sicknesse, and that used to swoune much."
Of course, the women prone to "swounes" in old novels were usually upper class. Poorer females didn't have time for such nervous palpitations!
Lavender has not always been a female scent, however. It was popular in the Roman baths, where it was called asarum. It derived its later name from the Latin "lavare"--"to wash," or, perhaps, from the Spanish "lavendera"--"a laundress." The variety employed was probably the French lavender stoechas which, some say, smells more like rosemary than lavender. It grew so abundantly on the Hyeres islands that the Romans called them the Stoechades. Although it seems that stoechas was originally known as French lavender and dentata as Spanish, they often get switched around these days!
Later used for strewing floors on festive occasions and in bonfires on St. John's Day, lavender stoechas was also known as sticadore and, as such, was one of the ingredients of the Four Thieves Vinegar. According to legend, this vinegar--which included a mix of antiseptic herbs like rosemary, sage, wormwood, rue, mint, and garlic--allowed certain scoundrels to rob victims of the bubonic plague with impunity.
The Greeks knew lavender as nardus or nard after a Syrian city called Naarda. It seems possible, therefore, that the spikenard with which a woman anointed Christ, could have been some form of lavender oil. (It is more likely however that it was nardostachys jatamansi.)
"Lavender spike," Gerard writes, "hath many stiffe branches of a wooddy substance. . .set with many long hoarie leaves. . .of a strong smell, and yet pleasant enough to such as do love strong savors. The floures grow at the top of the branches, spike fashion, of a blew colour."
He may have been describing lavender spica, which came to be known as "lesser lavender," since it was considered inferior to lavender vera. Hybrids produced by the crossing of vera and spica had an even less flattering appellation, "bastard lavender."
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