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I am not a would-be wizard, as in Harry Potter fiction, but for those who are, they can find many of the ”magical” herbs used to cast spells at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry growing today in various greenhouse gardens.

Many plants studied at the fictitious wizardry school have ancient and modern medicinal uses. A nursery owner in the Stroud area in Britain maintains that most people don’t actually realize how many plants mentioned in the Harry Potter books are real herbs and actually can have a powerful and dramatic effect on people.

A bubotuber looks like a thick, black, giant slug that sticks vertically out of the soil, with many large shiny swellings on it that are filled with a yellow-green pus that smells like petroleum.

As Professor Sprout (in Harry Potter fiction) taught her fourth-year students, the pus reacted oddly with human skin. Undiluted, it supposedly raised horrible painful boils on contact -- but properly diluted and processed would be used to cure acne.

Harry Potter’s wand was made of holly. Long ago, healers supposedly made a tea of its leaves to induce sweating and relieve fevers. It was believed that the juice from the berries also could cure jaundice.

The toxic, tangled root of mandrake helps Harry’s teacher supposedly reverse a turn-to-stone spell. Ancient Greeks added it to wine as an anesthetic. Today, if you refer to your latest National Geographic, eye drops contain a mandrake derivative that can paralyze the eye muscles so the pupils can stay open.

Supposedly, a species of tree that grew in the churchyard at “Little Hangleton” and in the “Forbidden Forest,” and can be used in the making of wands, is the yew. Today the drug Taxol, prescribed to treat breast, lung and ovarian cancer, first was synthesized from a compound in the tree’s bark, according to National Geographic.

Wormwood is a native to Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, but now grows wild in the U.S. Also called shrub wormwood, it is a member of the daisy family. It grows 1-3 feet tall and has gray-green or white stems covered with fine hairs.

Wormwood contains a wide variety of active compounds that contribute to its medicinal value, such as tannins, flavonoids and ascorbic acid.

Aconite (wolfs bane, as it is referred to in Harry Potter fiction) is a dried, poisonous tuberous root of a common monkshood used especially for its medicinal properties, as in relieving pain.

Plants are truly amazing!

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