Rare Herbs of the Ancients

I don't read the BBC a lot but a friend of mine pointed me to this cool article about an ancient Roman herb called silphium.

From the 2e Complete Druid's Handbook

I don't want to spoil the read because it's pretty awesome.  But there are three main things I want to tell you about it. First, it had a lot of different uses, both gastronomic and medicinal. Second, it could only grow in a tiny strip of land near the city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya; all attempts to cultivate it elsewhere failed.  Finally, its production declined precipitously after it was discovered, and was possibly lost forever within a period of about one hundred years.

When I was working on my B/X pirates game, two of the character classes I worked up used herbalism in place of casting magical spells, and silphium would have been an awesome herb to talk about and include in the herbalism section.  I think there is a lot of room in regular D&D for alchemists and herbalists.  Not only as NPCs you visit when you are in town, but for PCs.  

My friend John Wong of taxidermicowlbear once made up an Alchemist class for OD&D that was so good, I wanted to include it in Treasure Hunters.  In fact, here is a link to it!  

Zero Edition Alchemist

And Dave Arneson never had magic spell casting in his pre-D&D games.  Magic was potions and alchemical projectiles and magic items, never spell casting.  Which seems to me to be a fine way to handle things.  

I wonder if someone has made up an herbalist?  I think I remember something like that from Backswords & Bucklers...

It makes me wonder what D&D would be like if you replaced the Magic-User with the Alchemist, and the Cleric with the Herbalist?  Would it be so different?  Hard to say.