WILD LETTUCE

COMMON NAME: Wild Lettuce

LATIN NAME: Lactuca Virosa

ORIGIN: Europe

HABITAT: Wild Lettuce can be found in Australia, France, Germany, North America, Scotland. It grows on rocky soils, between shrubs.

BOTANICAL INFORMATION: This plant belongs to the family Asteraceae. It is a biennial herbaceous plant, can reach a height up to 150 cm. It has a smooth, bare, slightly bristly stem. The flowers are yellow in color, collected in a loose pyramidal panicle. The fruit is an achene, black, with a long white rostrum. It blooms in July - August. The leaves are horizontal, oblong-ovate, dentate.

CHEMICAL COMPOSITION:

All types of lettuce, including Wild Lettuce, contain white milky juice in the leaves and stems, in which bitter substances (lactucerin, lactucin, lacticitin), alkaloids, tarry and other substances are found.

For medicinal purposes, stems, leaves, flowers are collected during flowering and the milky sap of the plant (lactucaria), which is dried. Lactucaria has an acute bitter taste and an unpleasant odor.

HISTORY:

At the festivities in memory of Adonis - Adonals, which were predominantly handled by women, the “Adonis Gardens” - clay vessels with earth and plants planted in them - played a special role. It was lettuce, since the myth told that its leaves served as a diaper for the newborn Adonis, and later the salad was the last plant that he saw before his death.

Lettuce was eaten at funeral dinners in Greece and Rome and was called the plant of death.

As Herodotus said, the salad once really caused death: the Persian king Cambyses killed his wife because she dared to compare his family with the plucked salad, all the members of his family fell victim to his mistrust and cruelty.

The Egyptians held a harvest festival in honor of the god Mina every first month of summer. During the festival, a statue of God sprinkled with wild lettuce was carried by a festive procession.

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