Herb
The footpath weed — flat, ribbed, ignored, and named in the oldest English charm we have.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Plantain has nothing to do with the banana. It is the flat rosette of ribbed leaves that grows in the middle of every path, on every playing field, in every trodden gap in the pavement, and it thrives precisely because it is walked on — compaction kills its competitors and leaves it alone. The Nine Herbs Charm addresses it as waybread and speaks of it being run over by carts and trampled by women, and enduring.
That endurance is most of its meaning. Where the charm gives it strength against poison and infection, later English practice made it the standard field remedy: a leaf chewed and pressed to a nettle sting or a scrape, which almost every British child has been shown by somebody. It is one of the last surviving pieces of everyday folk herbalism still transmitted by demonstration.
Craft uses plantain for healing, endurance and safe travel, the last from its habit of growing along roads. It followed European settlement so faithfully across North America that it was called white man's footprint — an accurate ecological observation with a great deal of history behind it.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper picks a fight here: almost all astrology-physicians hold plantain to be an herb of Mars, he says, but the truth is it is under the command of Venus, and cures the head by antipathy to Mars. He offers the reasoning as though it settles the matter.
Carried forward
The Nine Herbs Charm, Old English, c. 10th century
The charm calls plantain waybread and mother of herbs, and speaks of carts running over it and women treading it, and of it withstanding all of that. Whatever else the poem is, it is a fair description of the plant.
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.