Pliny the Elder's intentionally all-encompassing 37-book Natural History is replete with purported medicinals in Books 20 to 35, and these range from muddled notices of exotics ‘from the East’, to occasionally precise descriptions of minerals, animal products and botanicals as they occur in the wild or are cultivated in the gardens and farms of Italy, Spain, Gaul and Roman Germany. Modern practitioners of phytopharmacy often sense a familiarity with Pliny's medicinal plants, but once one digs beneath the surface of presumed similarities, there emerges a multitude of indistinct and blurred uncertainties: sometimes this is the result of Pliny's too-rapid skimming of Greek and Latin written sources; sometimes the befuddled details originate from an over-credulous acceptance of folk-beliefs as they circulated in the early Roman Empire; and sometimes the flowing incoherence reflects a fusion of medicinal properties of several plants, minerals and animal products into a single and simplified colourful account.

J. Andre's careful re-editing of Books 20 to 25 in the Budé series (1965–1974), as well as his now-indispensable Les noms de plantes dans la Rome antique (1985; rpt. 2012), have provided some sure guidance through the thicket of nomenclatures as applicable to Roman garden lore and botanical pharmaceutics, and S. Amigues’ definitive edition, translation and commentary on Theophrastus’ Inquiry into Plants (Budé 1988–2006 as Théophraste Recherches sur les plantes; 5 vols) has given us greater assurance as we deal with Hellenistic and early Roman botanical lore. B. employs both, as she does numerous other studies in English, German, Italian and French (the bibliography suggests the expansion of ancient botanical and pharmacological studies since the mid-1980s), while she approaches the puzzle of Pliny's botany, as it might apply to the Roman West. In his short yet definitive study of Pliny's garden lore (and his access to local gardeners, including the centenarian Antonius Castor), J. Stannard's ‘Pliny and Roman Botany’, Isis 56 (1965), 420–5, demonstrated that, as long as he confined himself to Italy and the western provinces, Pliny's observations were in the main accurate and identifiable. Significantly, B. lists Stannard's 1965 essay as one of her many secondary sources, and this presumptive reliability is of narrow scope, adapted into the wider sweeps of western European botany, almost by forced analogy. Of course, cultivars could vary considerably from their wilderness cousins, so that once taking up those medical plants as harvested in the wild, Pliny could easily adduce greater powers among these remedies, thus obscuring what he believed to be the varieties – or as B. summarises them in Chapter 2, ‘Efficacité supérieure de la plante sauvage’ (pp. 65–84), followed appropriately in Chapter 3, ‘Des plantes sauvages efficaces mais aussi souvent hostiles’ (pp. 85–130). Here are the most dangerous herbs, those producing abortions and long-term sterility, likely a mirror of commonly-available drugs prescribed for such purposes, listed conveniently by Soranus of Ephesus (fl. c. a.d. 100–117) in his Gynecology 1.60–5. Not surprisingly, Pliny includes mandrake (Mandragora spp.) as one of the most toxic (B., pp. 108–12, with sources), a danger also emphasised by Dioscorides, Materia Medica 4.75.4 (ed. Wellmann, Vol. 2, p. 234), even while he recommends mandrake for anaesthetic use in surgeries.

As is well known to the many scholars who have studied Pliny's botany, the contrast with Dioscorides’ near-contemporary Materia Medica is occasionally stark, and both carry the signs of independent consultation of the same written texts: comparison of how Pliny utilised his written sources, with the near-identical descriptions as contained in the Materia Medica, demonstrates the often fragmentary employment by Pliny of such as Sextius Niger, whose full tract (in Greek) on medicinals was used likewise by Dioscorides, but with frequently painstaking personal verification of medicinal properties. In many respects, keying species of simples in Dioscorides’ Materia Medica is usually fairly straightforward, since each substance receives a description in company with similarly-acting herbs, animal products and minerals, a correlation termed ‘drug affinities’ by J. Riddle in his Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine (1985; rpr. 2012), pp. 94–131. N. Everett's hypothesis (in The Alphabet of Galen: Pharmacy from Antiquity to the Middle Ages [2012]) that Sextius Niger's drug books were rendered into Latin, sometime before the beginnings of the second century, thereby indicates that Pliny (among others of his day) may well have been able to consult Latin versions of Greek pharmaceutical works, much as there are traces of a Latin translation of Nicander of Colophon's Theriaca. B., however, assembles her catalogue with the prescient assumptions that one can perceive Pliny's methodologies by approaching the botanical properties as understood in the Western Roman Empire by means of ‘what they do’ when employed as medicinals, a partial reversal of the usual analysis, but quite like what one does (thanks to J. Riddle and others) with the medicinal substances in the Materia Medica. For Pliny the Elder, plants are one of three kinds: ornamental, culinary and medicinal, with overlapping uses among the three, and as B. documents, different names commonly occur for a single plant, adding to the confusion; and since this repetition appears without comment or special notice, likely Pliny either did not revise sections of the Natural History before he presented it to Titus in a.d. 77, or he simply forgot he had addressed particular substances in earlier books. B.'s ‘Index des noms de plantes dans l’Histoire Naturelle’ (pp. 470–9 [in double columns]) gives 944 botanical names, as recorded by Pliny the Elder, contrasted to the 554 listed in the ‘Index des noms savants de plantes’ (pp. 463–9 [again in double columns]), nicely delineating the multiples in Latin as opposed to the slimmed down enumeration in what today we call binomial nomenclatures. In themselves, these two tabulations will be useful to future researchers, since B. supplies the missing terminologies, omitted in both the L.I. and C. Mayhoff volume of indexes (Vol. 6 of the Teubner C. Plini Secundi Naturalis historiae [1898; rpt. 1970]), and the hit-and-miss listings in the occasional ‘indices of plants’ as furnished in the texts and translations in the Loeb Classical Library (H. Rackham, W.H.S. Jones and D.E. Eichholz [edd.], the Teubner text with translation [1938–1962], 10 vols).

Flowers matter, as do oils pressed from domesticated plants, and the overlapping of foods with drugs is cogently argued by B. in her second block, ‘Les plantes cultivées ornementales’, illustrated by common variety roses, irises, violets and lilies. Carefully noting the various parts of the species used as drugs (rhizome, petals, stems, roots, and so on), the sensual bridge to perfumes echoes details in Theophrastus’ Odours (Pliny cites Theophrastus fairly frequently), and such wafting aromas signal beneficial uses, still employed by perfumers and soap manufacturers in our own times. B. provides modern corollaries from phytochemistry to suggest the active principles present in these well-known garden flowers, and the long ‘medical appendix’ (pp. 373–452) will be of potential use by modern practitioners, curious about the efficacy of the botanicals in Pliny's Natural History. B.'s volume functions best as a handbook to the flora of Pliny's world, and anyone intrigued by the grand mixture of useful facts nestled among tall-tales told for amusement, should make use of this book. Splicing apart the phytochemical properties as crudely suggested in Pliny's first-hand observations, coupled with his omnivorous reading habits, yields some rather practical results.