Lamiaceae
Salvia rosmarinus
Rosemary
- Part used
- leafoil
- Native range
- Mediterranean basin
- Morphology
- An evergreen shrub to a metre and a half with narrow leathery needle-like leaves, dark above and white-felted beneath, and small pale blue two-lipped flowers.
- Also known as
- Rosmarinus officinalis
What is in it
Evidence
Small trials on aroma and cognitive performance report modest short-term effects on alertness and memory, with plausible pharmacology in 1,8-cineole. The literature is small and the effects are minor.
Safety
Culinary use is benign. The essential oil is convulsant in quantity and should not be taken internally. Contraindicated in epilepsy and in pregnancy at medicinal doses.
Interactions: May lower seizure threshold at high oil doses
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient. Rosemary extract is an approved food antioxidant.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Associated with memory and remembrance from the classical period — the association Ophelia refers to — and used in European practice for headache, poor memory and as a preservative and antiseptic.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Rosemary changed genus recently, which is a good demonstration of why this collection checks its names. Molecular work established that Rosmarinus sat inside Salvia, and the accepted name is now Salvia rosmarinus — so a plant every European herbal has called Rosmarinus officinalis for five hundred years is technically a sage.
The remembrance association also has an unexpectedly literal modern footnote: rosemary extract is one of the standard natural antioxidants used commercially to stop fats going rancid, which is a preservation function rather than a memory one, but is the reason it turns up on ingredient lists in products that have nothing to do with herbs.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.