The Ancient Roman Miracle Plant That Went Extinct

Morning Plant Lovers!

Have you ever lost something before?

Something you became super attached to?

For me, it's the great loss of video rental stores like Blockbuster.

Taken from us too early…

But for the Ancient Romans, it was likely this thing:

The Mediterranean miracle plant!

It was used in everything. The Romans loved the stuff.

So, what actually was Silphium, and what made it so special?

Well, the plant was native to the area around the Greek city of Cyrene in what is now Libya.

It was largely known to be an all-in-one Miracle plant.

One that, unlike a lot of ancient medicines, actually worked.

When it comes to everyday uses, silphium was used extensively in the kitchen.

It apparently tasted pretty similar to parsley and was widely considered to be a culinary delicacy.

One part that you would think would be inedible, the sap of its roots, could be dried and turned into a substance called Lasser.

Which turned out to be quite tasty and actually had additional medicinal properties.

Silphium was described as a healing plant used to treat conditions such as:

All you do is simply rub it into any area of interest, and boom! You are healed.

But perhaps its best use was as a contraceptive.

If you wanna make sexy time but don't want babies popping out where they're not wanted, there weren't many options in the times of ancient Rome.

But this did work.

And It very well may have been the first genuinely effective birth control.

Simply take a chickpea sized amount of silphium before getting it on…

And miraculously, no more baby!

As you can imagine… this became incredibly popular.

Some historians believe that it became so popular in “love making” that our modern heart shape originates from the seed pods of this plant.

Which look very similar, comparing a Silphium seed depicted on a roman coin to a modern heart design.

Unfortunately, despite the massive demand for it, this miracle plant was super hard to obtain.

There were countless attempts to farm Silphium but it just wouldn't grow anywhere.

Anywhere except the very small regions that it grew naturally. And even there, they couldn't figure out how to farm it.

For context, the size of the area where this stuff could grow was about the size of the “heel” of Italy’s “boot”.

So, yeah, not a super big area.

And because it wasn't farmable, it meant the only way to get your hands on the stuff was to pick it in its natural habitat.

And this meant it got depleted, QUICKLY.

People went crazy for the stuff.

So much so, at one point, the Greek government had to implement strict rules about how much could be harvested at one time.

This high demand caused the value of Silphium to skyrocket until the plant was basically worth its weight in gold.

You can see where this is going…

Eventually, after decades of plundering, the plant simply… vanished.

It couldn't be found anywhere anymore. Those pesky Romans robbed us of a wonder plant.

And now it's gone forever…

At least, as far as we know.

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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