Pasque flower

Pasque flower, Easter flower, passe flower, wind flower, meadow anemone; pharmacy Pulsatilla; Anemone pulsatilla L., now Pulsatilla vulgaris

Known today as

Anemone pulsatilla, of the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, a low plant of dry, open ground across central and northern Europe, in England a local plant of high chalk downs and limestone pastures. Its single flowers, about an inch and a half across, have dull violet-purple sepals silky beneath, and are followed by hairy seeds with long feathery tails; the whole plant is covered in silky hairs. Grieve derives pulsatilla from a Latin word meaning to beat, for the downy seeds beaten about by the wind. The whole herb, gathered soon after flowering, is the drug, and Grieve notes that the drug was also taken from the related meadow anemone.

Kind

Plant, in 1 older authority

Constituents

anemonin, anemonic acid

Earliest authority here

Gerard and Parkinson, as Grieve quotes them (A Modern Herbal, 1931)

In other databases

Plants of the World Online · GBIF · Wikidata

Caution. Poisonous. Grieve records that the fresh plant raises blisters on the skin and that its acrid oil breaks down into anemonin, “a powerful irritant, like cantharides,” which in overdoses causes violent inflammation of the stomach and bowels; pure anemonin depresses the circulation, breathing, and spinal cord, with slow feeble pulse, coldness, paralysis, and death, and in poisoning by the extract of the plant convulsions are always present. The meadow anemone, she adds, “has been considered somewhat dangerous.” Cows and horses will not touch the plant.