Endive.

Botanical name: 

Endivia.

A COMMON garden plant kept for salads. It grows two feet high, and the flowers are blue, but we see it a thousand times with only the leaves for once in a flower, and these the gardeners have the art of twisting and curling, and whitening in such a manner, that they are scarce to be known, as belonging to the plant. Naturally they are long and narrow, blunt at the end, and deeply notched at the edges, and of a yellowish green colour; the stalks are round and firm, and the leaves that grow of them are like those from the root, but smaller: the flowers stand at the tops of the stalks and branches, they are blue, and in shape and structure like those of dandelion: they are very beautiful.

The juice of endive maybe taken with great advantages as medicine; it cools the stomach, and operates by urine very powerfully; it also opens obstructions of the viscera. It is good against the jaundice, and constantly taken for some time, against the scurvy.


The Family Herbal, 1812, was written by John Hill.