Rosemary: History and Traditional Use

Few kitchen herbs carry as much history as rosemary — the fragrant, needle-leaved evergreen of the Mediterranean hillsides. For more than two thousand years it has flavoured food, scented bathwater and linen, been burned to “purify” the air of sickrooms, carried by mourners at funerals and by brides at weddings, and prized as a token of memory and faithfulness. This article follows rosemary from the writings of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny, through the medieval and Renaissance herbals, the legend of Hungary Water, and Shakespeare's stage, to the chemistry laboratory where its famous compounds were finally isolated and the 2017 reclassification that made it, officially, a kind of sage. Where the record is solid we say so; where a much-loved story is really folklore, we say that too — because on a health page, getting the history honest matters.

Table of Contents

  1. The Plant and Its Name
  2. Greece and Rome: The Ancient Record
  3. The Herb of Remembrance: Funerals, Weddings, and Memory
  4. Medieval and Renaissance Herbals
  5. Hungary Water and the First Perfumes
  6. Rosemary as Disinfectant and Plague Fumigant
  7. The Culinary and Garden Tradition
  8. A Modern Tradition: Rosemary for Remembrance on ANZAC Day
  9. From Folklore to Laboratory: The Compounds Named
  10. Research Papers and References
  11. Connections
  12. Featured Videos

The Plant and Its Name

Rosemary is an aromatic, woody evergreen shrub of the mint family (Lamiaceae), native to the dry, rocky, sun-baked coasts and hillsides of the Mediterranean basin. Its stiff, narrow, needle-like leaves — dark green above, paler beneath — and its small pale-blue (sometimes white or pink) flowers have made it one of the most recognisable plants in the world, grown today in gardens and on windowsills far beyond its homeland. It was Carl Linnaeus who, in 1753, gave it the botanical name by which it was known for the next two and a half centuries: Rosmarinus officinalis. The epithet officinalis — “of the workshop,” meaning a plant kept in the apothecary's store — is itself a record of how thoroughly rosemary was regarded as a medicinal herb.

The name Rosmarinus is very old: the Roman writer Columella used the compound form in the first century CE, and Pliny the Elder adopted rosmarinus, remarking that “this is the way the plant is called.” The derivation almost everyone repeats is the poetic ros marinus, “dew of the sea” — a lovely image of a plant glistening on the coast. It is worth being honest, though, that this is a traditional, possibly folk, etymology rather than a settled fact. Careful reading of the Roman poets suggests the “marine” element may have referred figuratively to a bitter, salt-like taste rather than to a seaside habitat, and no ancient text actually says that rosemary grows by the shore or is wetted by sea-spray. The pretty translation has simply outlived scrutiny, as pretty translations often do.

A second naming twist arrived only recently. On the basis of DNA (molecular phylogenetic) evidence, botanists in 2017 found that rosemary sits firmly inside the large genus Salvia — the sages — rather than in a genus of its own. To keep the classification consistent, Rosmarinus was folded into Salvia, and rosemary's accepted scientific name became Salvia rosmarinus. That exact combination was not new: the botanist Fridolin Spenner had already published Salvia rosmarinus back in 1835, so the 2017 change revived an older name rather than inventing one. In plain terms, the herb you cook with is, botanically speaking, a kind of sage — which is why you will see both Salvia rosmarinus and the long-familiar Rosmarinus officinalis on labels and in the research literature.

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Greece and Rome: The Ancient Record

Rosemary's documented medicinal life begins with the ancient Greek and Roman naturalists, and the record is genuinely old — though it does not say quite what modern repetition often claims. The Greek philosopher and botanist Theophrastus (fourth to third century BCE) already described uses for the root and seed, including the treatment of wounds and the practice of laying the herb among stored clothes to keep moths away. The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, writing his great pharmacopoeia De Materia Medica in the first century CE, classed rosemary among the “warming” plants and recorded it for jaundice and for use in baths and ointments. His Roman contemporary Pliny the Elder catalogued a long list of indications in his Natural History — for wounds, haemorrhoids, jaundice, sharpening of vision, chest complaints, and as an ingredient cooked with honey for coughs. The physician Galen (second to third century CE) treated it as a warming, sweat-promoting (diaphoretic) and softening remedy. These ancient works are named here as historical primary sources rather than as modern citations.

The Greeks and Romans also gave rosemary a place in religion and remembrance. The Roman-era herbal attributed to Pseudo-Apuleius preserves a striking line — that “before incense was known, humans placated the gods” with rosemary — reflecting a real tradition of burning the fragrant wood as a sacred offering and fumigant. From these classical roots grow rosemary's two oldest and most durable identities: a warming medicinal herb of the apothecary, and an aromatic plant burned and carried in rites for the gods and the dead.

One widely repeated story, however, should be flagged. It is very commonly said that ancient Greek students wore wreaths or garlands of rosemary to sharpen their memory while studying for examinations. This is a charming and ubiquitous claim — but it does not appear in the surviving ancient medical or botanical texts of Dioscorides, Pliny, or Galen, and is best treated as a later, modern embellishment rather than a documented classical practice. As the next section shows, rosemary's firm, traceable association with memory actually begins much later — in the Renaissance.

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The Herb of Remembrance: Funerals, Weddings, and Memory

If rosemary is remembered for one thing in the English-speaking world, it is as the “herb of remembrance.” That reputation is real and well attested — but it is largely a tradition of medieval and early-modern Europe, not of antiquity. In medieval and Tudor times rosemary was a common funeral plant: mourners carried sprigs in the funeral procession and cast them into the open grave, a fragrant token that the dead would not be forgotten. The very same herb served the opposite occasion. Rosemary was woven into bridal wreaths and bouquets and carried at weddings as a symbol of love, fidelity, and remembrance — the promise that the couple would always remember one another and their families. A plant standing for memory at both the wedding and the graveside is a poignant detail that says a great deal about how deeply it was woven into the rhythm of life and death.

The literary monument to this tradition is Shakespeare. In Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 5), the grieving, unravelling Ophelia distributes flowers, each with a meaning, and says: “There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you, love, remember.” Written around 1600, the line did not invent the symbolism — it drew on a folk meaning already familiar to Shakespeare's audience — but it fixed “rosemary for remembrance” in the language so firmly that the phrase survives to this day. Other domestic customs of the same period tucked rosemary under the pillow to drive away bad dreams and evil spirits, an echo of its old role as a protective, purifying plant.

And the memory connection is not pure superstition. Renaissance herbalists explicitly recommended rosemary for the head, the brain, and the memory (see the next section), and — remarkably — modern aroma-and-cognition research has found measurable, if modest, effects of rosemary scent on aspects of memory and alertness, discussed at the end of this article. The folk tradition raised a question; centuries later, science began to test it.

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Medieval and Renaissance Herbals

Through the medieval and early-modern centuries, rosemary passed from the classical authorities into the great printed herbals, and it is here — not in antiquity — that its documented reputation as a brain-and-memory herb truly takes shape. The German physician-botanist Leonhart Fuchs, in his celebrated herbal of 1542, recorded both the practice of burning rosemary in houses to “clean the air infected by pestilence” and the claim that the herb “restores the brain, the senses, memory, and the heart.” A little over a decade later the Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens (1554) likewise directed rosemary to “all problems affecting the head and the brain.”

In England, the herbalist John Gerard, in his famous Herball (1597, later revised by Thomas Johnson in 1636), wrote that “rosemary comforteth the braine, the memorie,” and credited part of this knowledge to Arabic medical learning. The slightly later, hugely popular astrological herbal of Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physician (1652), placed rosemary under the sun and the sign of Aries and listed it for the head, the memory, weak digestion, and a long roll of other complaints. These herbals are named here as historical texts; what matters for an honest history is the pattern they reveal — the firm, written association of rosemary with the head, the senses, and the memory is a Renaissance development, repeated and amplified from one herbalist to the next, and it is this stream (not a classical one) that flows directly into Shakespeare's “rosemary for remembrance” and into the herb's reputation today.

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Hungary Water and the First Perfumes

No history of rosemary is complete without Hungary Water — also called the Queen of Hungary's Water or, plainly, “spirits of rosemary.” Distilled chiefly from rosemary in alcohol (later recipes added thyme, lavender, mint, sage, and citrus), it is often described as one of the first alcohol-based perfumes in Europe, used both as a fragrance and as a rubbing medicine for aches, gout, and rheumatism. As a milestone in the history of distillation and perfumery, Hungary Water is genuine and important.

Its origin story, however, is firmly the stuff of legend, and deserves to be told as such. Tradition holds that the formula was created in the fourteenth century — a date of around 1370 is often cited — for an elderly and ailing Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, and that it so restored her health and beauty that (in the most colourful version) a young king proposed marriage to her when she was in her seventies. It is a wonderful tale, and almost none of it can be verified. The recipe's true date is, as one careful summary puts it, “lost to history”; the surviving accounts of the royal legend were mostly written down in the early-to-mid seventeenth century, two or three centuries after the events they describe, and even the identity of the “Queen Elizabeth” in question is uncertain. Hungary Water itself is real; its romantic backstory is best enjoyed as folklore, not biography.

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Rosemary as Disinfectant and Plague Fumigant

One of rosemary's most persistent historical roles was as an aromatic disinfectant. Long before anyone understood germs, people reasoned that foul-smelling, “corrupt” air carried disease, and that sweet, strong-smelling smoke could cleanse it. Rosemary, abundant and intensely fragrant, was an obvious choice. The practice of burning it to purify the air of sickrooms and houses reaches back to the classical world — recall the Pseudo-Apuleius line about placating the gods with rosemary before incense was known — and it was explicitly recommended in the Renaissance, as when Fuchs (1542) advised burning rosemary to “clean the air infected by pestilence.”

During the recurring waves of plague that swept Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, rosemary was among the herbs most in demand for exactly this purpose. Sprigs were burned in homes and public buildings, strewn on floors, carried in the hand, and (with other aromatics) packed into the heads of canes and into pomanders held to the nose in the street, so that the carrier breathed fragrant herb-laden air rather than the supposedly pestilent vapours around them. Rosemary is one of the herbs traditionally named in the lore of the “Four Thieves Vinegar,” the aromatic preparation that grave-robbers were said to have used to protect themselves during plague — itself a colourful tradition rather than a documented prescription. The underlying theory of “bad air” was wrong, but the instinct was not entirely baseless: modern work confirms that rosemary's essential oil has real antimicrobial activity, which is part of why these old fumigation customs proved so stubbornly enduring.

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The Culinary and Garden Tradition

Alongside medicine and ritual, rosemary has always been, above all, a kitchen and garden plant. Its robust, resinous, pine-and-citrus flavour stands up to long cooking and strong ingredients, and Mediterranean cooks have used it for centuries with lamb and other roast meats, with poultry, fish, beans, breads, and roasted vegetables, and to flavour oils and vinegars. Because rosemary is an evergreen, a single shrub supplies the cook year-round, and its woody stems even double as fragrant skewers for grilling. In the garden it has long been valued as a hardy, drought-tolerant, sweetly aromatic ornamental, clipped into hedges and knot-garden borders and prized as a magnet for bees.

This everyday domestic familiarity is a quiet but important thread in rosemary's story. A plant that sits on the windowsill and goes into the Sunday roast is a plant that every household knows intimately — and that intimacy is exactly why so much medicinal lore, religious symbolism, and folk custom could attach to it. The same humble shrub that flavoured the stew was also burned for the gods, carried to the grave, woven into the bridal wreath, and distilled into the queen's perfume. Rosemary's culinary ubiquity and its rich tradition are not separate facts; they are two sides of the same long companionship between this plant and the people of the Mediterranean world and, eventually, the world at large.

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A Modern Tradition: Rosemary for Remembrance on ANZAC Day

Rosemary's ancient role as the herb of remembrance found a powerful new expression in the twentieth century, and this strand of its history is recent enough to be well documented. In Australia and New Zealand it is customary, on ANZAC Day (25 April) and sometimes on Remembrance Day, to wear a small sprig of rosemary pinned to the lapel, over the left breast near the heart, in memory of those who died in war. The choice of rosemary draws directly on its old European meaning of remembrance — but it has a specific and moving local reason as well.

Rosemary grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula in present-day Türkiye, the site of the costly 1915 campaign in which the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps suffered heavy losses. According to the account preserved by Australian commemorative authorities, a wounded soldier repatriated to South Australia in 1915 brought home a cutting of rosemary taken from Gallipoli; it was planted, propagated, and cuttings were later distributed to nurseries to help plant the “Avenues of Honour” that line many Australian towns. The plant that grew on the battlefield thus became, quite literally, a living link to the fallen — and so an old herb of memory acquired, within living memory, an entirely new and deeply felt meaning.

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From Folklore to Laboratory: The Compounds Named

The thread that runs through rosemary's history is that tradition raised questions which chemistry would much later try to answer. In the twentieth century, researchers began isolating and naming the specific molecules behind rosemary's aroma, its remarkable keeping power as a preservative, and its medicinal reputation — and these are genuine, well-documented scientific milestones with real, named investigators.

The first of the famous rosemary compounds to be pinned down was rosmarinic acid. In 1958 the Italian chemists M. L. Scarpati and G. Oriente isolated and characterised it from rosemary and gave it its name — taken directly from rosmarinus — showing it to be an ester of caffeic acid. Though rosmarinic acid is now known to occur in many plants of the mint and borage families, it was in rosemary that it was first found and named, a small piece of linguistic history that keeps the herb's name alive in laboratories worldwide.

The other signature compounds are the phenolic diterpenes carnosic acid and carnosol, which give rosemary much of its powerful antioxidant punch. Their story is tangled in the best historical way. A bitter principle from a related sage (Salvia carnosa) was reported as far back as 1942, and an oxidised form was named carnosol (also called pikrosalvin). Carnosic acid itself was first reported by Linde, in sage, in 1964; the following year Wenkert and colleagues (1965) found it abundantly in rosemary and showed that carnosol is in fact an oxidation product (an “artifact”) of carnosic acid. Today carnosic acid is the basis of the rosemary extracts approved as natural antioxidant food preservatives — a modern, regulated use that is, in a sense, the direct scientific descendant of the old custom of using rosemary to keep food and air “sweet.”

Modern research has gone on to ask whether rosemary's most romantic reputation — as the herb of memory — holds up. The best-known work comes from the laboratory of Mark Moss: a 2012 study by Moss and Oliver reported that volunteers exposed to rosemary essential-oil aroma absorbed measurable amounts of the volatile compound 1,8-cineole into the bloodstream, and that higher blood levels correlated with better performance on certain cognitive tasks. These findings are intriguing and much-cited, but they come from small studies and should be read as early, suggestive science rather than proof that rosemary “boosts the brain.” What can be said honestly is this: a folk belief written down by Renaissance herbalists, and immortalised by Shakespeare, has at last begun to be examined in the laboratory — and the centuries-old name rosmarinus now lives on inside the very molecules that science extracts from the plant. The fuller account of these compounds and the clinical evidence is taken up in the Rosemary Benefits articles.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines key peer-reviewed reviews of rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus / Rosmarinus officinalis) with curated PubMed topic-search links into its ethnobotanical, historical, and phytochemical literature. Historical primary texts (the works of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, and Galen; the herbals of Fuchs, Dodoens, Gerard, and Culpeper; and the 1958 paper of Scarpati and Oriente) are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only stable DOI, PMID, and database links are hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

  1. de Oliveira JR, Camargo SEA, de Oliveira LD. Rosmarinus officinalis L. (rosemary) as therapeutic and prophylactic agent. Journal of Biomedical Science. 2019;26:5. — doi:10.1186/s12929-019-0499-8
  2. Nieto G, Ros G, Castillo J. Antioxidant and antimicrobial properties of rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis, L.): a review. Medicines (Basel). 2018;5(3):98. — doi:10.3390/medicines5030098
  3. Birtić S, Dussort P, Pierre FX, Bily AC, Roller M. Carnosic acid. Phytochemistry. 2015;115:9-19. — doi:10.1016/j.phytochem.2014.12.026
  4. Al-Dhabi NA, Arasu MV, Park CH, Park SU. Recent studies on rosmarinic acid and its biological and pharmacological activities (review citing the 1958 isolation by Scarpati and Oriente). EXCLI Journal. 2014;13:1192-1195. — PMID: 26417331
  5. Moss M, Oliver L. Plasma 1,8-cineole correlates with cognitive performance following exposure to rosemary essential oil aroma. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. 2012;2(3):103-113. — doi:10.1177/2045125312436573
  6. Salvia rosmarinus taxonomy and the 2017 reclassification from Rosmarinus into Salvia — PubMed: Salvia rosmarinus taxonomy and phylogeny
  7. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis / Salvia rosmarinus) ethnobotany and traditional use — PubMed: rosemary ethnobotany and traditional use
  8. Rosemary aroma, memory, and cognitive performance — PubMed: rosemary aroma, memory, and 1,8-cineole
  9. Carnosic acid and rosmarinic acid — chemistry and pharmacology — PubMed: rosemary carnosic acid and rosmarinic acid

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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