Water Germander

It is an insignificant looking plant, growing wild, and cultivated in gardens for its medicinal uses. The stalks are square, hairy, of a dirty green, and very weak. The leaves are short, broad, indented at the edges, woolly and soft. The flowers are small and red, standing in little parcels on the upper joints of the stalks. The smell of the plant is unpleasant.

Used as a decoction, it is sudorific. It is good against fevers. The tincture, in small doses, is a good remedy for exhilarating and rousing torpid faculties. They are gallant, fine, temperate flowers, yea, so temperate, that no excess, neither in heat, cold, dryness, nor moisture, can be perceived in them; they are great strengtheners both of the brain and heart, and will thereafore serve either for cordials or cephalics, as your occasion will serve. There is both a syrup and a conserve made of them. To take now and then a little of either, strengthens nature much in such as are in consumptions.

They are good in hot pestilential fevers, and expel poison. One ounce of the flowers, in one pint of boiling water constitutes the infusion. For the syrup, flowers, 1 ounce, boiling water, 4 ounces, refined sugar, half a pound. Let the flowers infuse half-a-day; then very gently boil down to one-fourth the quantity. The vineagar of cloves is a cephalic, the smell removing headache, sickness, etcetera.

It is an excellent deodorizer for sick rooms. It is made by merely steeping one ounce of petals in a pint of best vinegar for 14 days.