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Tall North American perennial herbs
Answer for the clue "Tall North American perennial herbs ", 8 letters:
silphium
Word definitions for silphium in dictionaries
Wikipedia
Word definitions in Wikipedia
Silphium is a genus of North American plants in the sunflower tribe within the daisy family . Members of the genus, commonly known as rosinweeds , are herbaceous perennial plants growing to 0.5–4 m tall, with yellow (rarely white) flowerheads. The name ...
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. A plant, thought to be extinct, used in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome in cooking and as a contraceptive.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
plant genus, 1771, from Latin, from Greek Silphion , name of a North African Mediterranean plant whose identity has been lost, the gum or juice of which was prized by the ancients as a condiment and a medicine. Probably of African origin.
Usage examples of silphium.
Marcus Cato, is a wilderness of silphium, a scrubby little bush that your mules, goats and oxen will feast on.
Ten Thousand set off into a flat wilderness of silphium and little else, the ocher ground between those drab, greyish little bushes littered with rubble and fist-sized stones.
No goat expert, he supposed this had something to do with too much silphium and no straw hats or other delicacies.
But what tiny supplies of driftwood they combed from the beaches had to be saved for the cooking fires, silphium and meat.
Apart from a brazen sky and silphium scrub, their constant companion was the sea, a huge expanse of polished aquamarine, fluffed with white where rocks lurked, breaking in gentle wavelets upon beach after beach after beach.
Only a year or two ago, there was a newspaper story about an Italian doctor who thought he had discovered silphium again in Cirenaica.
Santini and three of his men appeared, laughing, swabbing at their lips, evidence that they had quaffed of the silphium brew.
Cyrenaica produced the silphium, or asafoetida, which, like the balm of Gilead, was one of the specifics of antiquity, and which is really a medicine of value.
This plant is also known by the names of Pilot plant, Polar plant, Rosin and Turpentine weed, and like the Cup plant of another species, Silphium Loeve, with tuberous roots, which are a native food in the Columbia valley, is cultivated in English gardens.