Gypsywort
Lycopus europaeus
Family · Lamiaceae · Harmless
The mint relative of ditches and riverbanks with deeply cut leaves like an animal's paw, and whorls of tiny white flowers dotted purple. It has no scent, despite looking like mint.
Streams and ditches · Fields and pasture
Also known asbugleweed, water horehound
How to tell it
An upright four-angled stem to a metre, in water or very close to it. Opposite, elongated leaves with deep sharp cuts on the lower half, which gives the name wolf's foot. Dense whorls of white flowers two to three millimetres at the axils, four-lobed with purple dots in the throat.
What it is confused with
Water mint
Mentha aquatica
Rub and smell: water mint smells strongly of mint, gypsywort smells of nothing. And water mint's leaves are merely toothed, gypsywort's are deeply cut.
What it is for
Traditional medicinal use in thyroid problems, and still studied for it. It is not a plant for homemade infusions: it interferes with thyroid hormones and with medication, and is exactly the kind of use not to improvise. It gave a black dye used by travelling pedlars to darken the skin, hence one of the English names.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.