I once went on a botanizing walk in Transylvania with a local expert who pointed to a meadow dominated by what looked like the same stuff - he said (via an interpreter from Hungarian) that it was locally known as "useless plant" or "cursed plant", and the meadow we were looking at was traditionally believed to have been accursed with it after a bishop was murdered there a few centuries before.

When does the tune for "The Rattling Bog" date from? It was known in Scotland as "March to the Battlefield" in the 1830s.