Snow covers the pasture, but the fruits of summer hold court inside the spacious farmhouse that is Lydia Mussulman’s home on the outskirts of Bangor.

On the dining room table, an artichoke lies next to a glass jar of bright orange petals from a perennial sunflower. Nearby, a spray of sea lavender and wild oregano is interspersed with Japanese iris pods, purple cornflower and two kinds of yarrow.

Most colorful are the three platters of rose petals, “one of the things I love to dry the most,” Mussulman explained. “They’re not overpowering odors – I don’t perfume them. You can add seashells, dried orange, cinnamon sticks.”

A master gardener and past president of the Maine Herb Society, Mussulman has given many talks on drying flowers and making potpourri. Some items she dries by hanging in her attic during the summer, and others she dries with silica gel, producing a crisper result.

She now has a special passion for medieval herbs, an interest spurred by a request last year to speak on the topic at the Page Farm and Home Museum at the University of Maine. Mussulman is a board member for the museum, and her presentation would complement another talk about a novel involving an herbalist.

Mussulman already had an interest in the past, and had worked on the Bangor Garden Club’s medicinal herb and food display for a Civil War exhibit at the Bangor Historical Society a few years ago.

“It was fascinating to understand how little they had,” she said of the Civil War period. If the 1800s fascinated her, medieval times enthralled her.

Mussulman read several books on the subject, including Eleanor Sinclair Rohde’s 1922 book, “The Old English Herbals.”

But the centerpiece of her research was “Lacnunga,” a book of charms, recipes and sung poems written by “A-S” before the 10th century, possibly in the 800s.

“The copy we have was originally from 1100,” Mussulman said of the edition she borrowed through interlibrary loan with the help of the Bangor Public Library.

It was changed from the first edition, she points out, “overlaid with Christian doctrine” by a priest in an effort to modify the pagan document for the Anglo-Saxon common folk.

It helps to know some of the beliefs of the time, Mussulman said.

Any sudden pain – whether from a heart attack, appendicitis, gout or even muscle spasm – was a sign of being “elf-shot,” she said, by little people supposedly living in forests and marshes, shooting unseen arrows.

“It was one of the ways they explained the way things happened,” she said. The elves were presumed to have the power “to make things grow, to make things die.”

Illnesses such as croup and bronchial ailments were blamed on drafts or putrid air, known as “flying venoms,” Mussulman said. “People had no idea about germs or microbial viruses.”

At the same time, the Anglo-Saxons believed that herbs offered antidotes and protection, as shown in a portion of the “Lacnunga” poem about the nine sacred herbs:

All weeds must

Now to herbs give way

Seas dissolve

(and) all salt water

when I this venom

from thee blow.

Hanging fennel on St. John’s Eve on June 23, the eve of St. John the Baptist’s feast day, was said to ward off evil spirits.

Chewing the seeds lessened hunger on the church’s fasting days, and serpents were reputed to eat the plant to improve eyesight when they were shedding their skins.

“And Prometheus carried fire in a fennel bulb,” Mussulman said, referring to a Greek myth.

The day she gave her presentation on “The Nine Sacred Herbs of Medieval Times,” she used a mortar and pestle belonging to the Page Farm and Home Museum to crush up fennel, releasing a light odor of anise.

“You could smell it all over the barn,” she said.

Mussulman showed some 40 attendees examples of the other sacred herbs and plants, too – watercress, full of vitamin C; mugroot, which protects against evil spirits; waybroad, used to treat eczema or like a bandage to stop bleeding; and chervil, actually sweet cicely, used to polish oak floors and furniture.

She’s not sure what crab apple was used for – possibly small pieces of branch became runes to foretell the future. And she has no idea about atterlothe, a word she thinks may have been miscopied from the original text.

Nettles, she explained, had many uses, from steeping into a tea to treat respiratory problems to making a cloth nearly as good as silk. Cows wouldn’t eat the fresh “stinging” nettles, she said, but would eat them dried. And chamomile, often found today in teas to induce sleep and calm, was used to treat fevers, chills, malaria and tuberculosis.

“Almost all these plants were wild plants,” Mussulman pointed out. “Some of these things stay green all winter in the climate of England. Green things in the winter are just very valuable.

“They could be used by soldiers traveling,” she said. “They could be easily identified. You know you can eat the watercress. Chamomile, you eat the blossoms, and make tea from the fresh as well as dried.”

Several of the herbs “would heal you or make you feel better,” she said, and they also were good for animals.

Many of the original items sold by apothecaries were actually from dried herbs they bought from women who gathered or grew them.

Mussulman started out years ago with one little plot of herbs.

“Now I have six large plots,” she said. She urges gardeners to experiment with growing a variety of herbs, even pressing them into booklets or perhaps making a small “sleep pillow” with herbs, oil essence and lavender.

Though not one of the sacred herbs, “lavender is supposed to give you sweet dreams,” she said. She also makes a salve from calendula flower, olive oil, beeswax beads and sometimes a little oil essence. She has demonstrated that process for groups whose members are interested in making their own.

Mussulman, who moved to Bangor nine years ago because of her husband’s job, spent months researching the sacred herbs. Truth be told, she’s still working to learn more about them and about herbs in general.

The Maine Herb Society meets 9:30 a.m.-noon the second Thursday of the month, September through May, usually at the office of Shop ‘n Save on Maine Avenue in Bangor. For information, call Lydia Mussulman at 942-7127.