Herb
Aniseed feather and a hollow stalk — and a family you must never guess at.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Fennel is the plant Prometheus is said to have carried fire in: the dried stalk is hollow and pithy and will hold a smouldering ember for hours, which is a real property and probably the origin of the myth. Greek runners were fed it, the battlefield of Marathon is named for it, and it grew along Roman roads across Europe, where its descendants still line motorway verges in the south.
Anglo-Saxon medicine thought highly of it — fennel is one of the nine herbs of the charm — and it hung over doors at midsummer and was pushed into keyholes against unwelcome things. Culpeper's advice to boil fennel with fish was a piece of practical kitchen wisdom dressed in humoral theory, and people still do it.
The warning here is not really about fennel, which is benign. It is about the family. Wild fennel, cow parsley, hemlock and hemlock water-dropwort are all umbellifers with feathery leaves and white umbels, and two of those will kill you. Nobody should gather from this family on a hunch.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Duskveil safety note
Every fatal plant poisoning in Britain that involves a herb-gatherer seems to involve this family. Feathery leaves and a white umbel describe fennel, cow parsley, wild carrot, hemlock and hemlock water-dropwort equally well. Buy the seed.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper approves of one good old fashion not yet left off — boiling fennel with fish — on the grounds that it consumes the phlegmatic humour that fish so plentifully afford. The theory is wrong and the cooking advice is excellent.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.