A RICH-RED resin used in medicine, mummification, painting and varnish, dragon’s blood was one of the ancient world’s most precious plant substances. The best product was sap harvested from trees whose branches were scaly, snaking, crested with dagger-like leaves and sprang, like writhing necks, from massive trunks. They were thought to resemble multi-headed dragons; perhaps even to be some monster such as Hydra or Ladon, which, upon being heroically slain, had metamorphosed into vegetable form but remained capable, if wounded, of shedding magic blood.
We now know that they were Dracaena, chiefly D. cinnabari from Socotra and possibly also D. serrulata and D. ombet, from Arabia, Egypt and the Sudan, but there was no such clarity in Antiquity. So remote were these trees’ habitats, and so protective were the…
