Artemisia vulgaris. As with all the artemesias (except French tarragon) use with caution.

Uses of mugwort:

Culinary Uses: Dried leaves were once used to brew beer. (Fresh herbs give a horrible-tasting beer!) Young leaves or flowers can be used in cooking. Young stems and leaves in a small quantity (1 teaspoon to 2 litres) can be used to flavour vegetable soups and sauces. Dried panicles can be added to roast goose or to fat pork and roast mutton. In a small quantity, fresh mugwort can be used to season salads and also pancake batter.

Medicinal Uses: Used to treat digestive problems, to increase appetite, as a diuretic, and for depression. Also used to treat irregular menstruation, bronchitis, sciatic pain, palsy, epilepsy, fever, diabetes and to eliminate intestinal worms. Used as a moxa to stimulate acupuncture points. Use in a bath to relieve muscular aches and pains, or in a footbath for tired, swollen feet.

Other Uses: Use in sachets to repel moths. Plant in chicken coops to repel lice. It is often included in sleep pillows and is claimed to help the sleeper remember dreams more clearly. [Let us know if it works!]

Folklore: Aids in astral projection when placed near the bed. Use in dream pillows for prophetic dreams. A branch kept under the doorstep will keep away annoying visitors. Burn to banish bad influences and bring an immediate halt to bad habits. Stuffed into a small pillow or placed beneath your pillow, mullein will guard against nightmares. Hanging it in the house is reputed to protect against lightning, while putting it under the doorstep is supposed to ensure that no unwelcome person will enter. Mugwort gathered on Midsummer Eve and placed in a grain bin was thought to keep mice away from the grain. If made into a girdle, mugwort was thought to protect one from witches, ghosts and general misfortune. Put some mugwort into the shoe while travelling, for protection from sunstroke, wild beasts and evil spirits and to prevent fatigue on long journeys. Carried, it brings loved ones safely home from journeys.

Warning: Avoid when pregnant, as it may cause abortion. Do not use regularly or frequently, or more than 30g fresh at one time, and best used for specific occasions. Large doses may cause nausea, liver damage and convulsions.

I make a Dream Balm with mugwort and other herbs in it. People LOVE it. You just rub a bit into your earlobes or temples. You could also make a potpourri with mugwort, then place it by your bed and smell just before drifting off to sleep. I always have a bowl of it bedside.

Usually, it's the Japanese variety of mugwort, Yomogi, that is used in moxabustion. And yes, mugwort (herb of the mug) was used as a bittering agent before hops were included in beer. It's bittering action is what makes it a digestive stimulant. If you are prone to gallstones, avoid ingesting mugwort. Adelma Simmons, grand dame of Caprilands, wrote a booklet entitled, "Midsummer, Magic and Mugwort" and is a nice compilation of folk uses.

mugwort is a wonderful culinary, medicinal, and recreational herb.

My experiences with it started as my misunderstanding and thought that it may be a substitute for marihuana, however not really mimicing marihuana well, I found that it was a good herb in it's own rite.

I have found that Mugwort's flavor goes good in numerous types of food. Caution should be used hen cooking with mugwort because of the consituent thujone, which exists in mugwort at a realitively safe recreational level, and as such, care should be used to use it at a dose that will impart it's sweet, mildly licorice like flavor but not enough to impart it's medicinal or recreational qualities, which I find that anywhere between an eight to 1 whole leaf is a good amount for this. I sometimes enjoy mugwort in scrambled eggs, and I have also heard good things about it's use to flavor rice.

It's medicinal qualities are inducing lucid dreaming, and to an extent inhibiting and sometimes killing intestinal parasites.

I particularly enjoy mugwort for it's recreational qualities though. The methods for ingesting for this purpose can be eating the herb (usually at quantities over 1 leaf) making mugwort tea, or smoking mugwort. It has a light and uplifting, somewhat euphoric high (around the same level of euphoric potentail as raw cacao (chocolate) beans, and mild hallucinations. The hallucinations are usually nothing more than seeing colors a little more 'vividly', sometimes vision distortion (ie- 'wide angle lens/fish eye vision) but sometimes, at higher doses, can cause either psychedelic hallucinations (seeing colors that are not part of a real object, seeing objects that aren't there but resemble objects that are) or sometimes delusions (seeing something that isn't there but looks real enough to make telling the difference difficult, this is rare and only happens at very high doses). Don't get too over excited or nervous though, mugwort, at least at reasonable definitions of high doses, can't cause hallucinogenic fantasies, or 'trips' as some people call them, and you will remain in reality, just random and non-overwhelming visual intrest capturing, short lived oddities, and again, only at high doses. for some reason, mugwort that has turned orange in the fall is more likely to cause visuals, and mugwort that has turned predominately purple for the fall tends to offer more of a strictly mild stimulant effect, even if that same plant in the summer was one that produced visuals. I do not know the reason why some mugwort I find that some mugwort becomes orange, and others purple, or what the corralation with the distinction of recreational values is.
Other then that, Mugwort is a stimulant (although obviously not a strong one because people can sleep and enjoy the dreaming effects. Also, it is important to note that, as I have found to be the case, plants that produce an herby flavor don't cause the dreaming effect, and those that have a licorice-y are more likely to cause both the dreaming effects and the psychedelic effects. This seems to have nothing to do with the color changing phenominon in the fall as plants that have even the most pronounced psychedelic/dreaming effects that have a strong licorice-y flavor can become purple in the fall and have only a strictly stimulant effect, and vice versa. The usual dose of mugwort (1-2 cigarettes, a cup of mugwort tea, 2-3 leaves chewed and swallowed) usually only produces the stimulant effect with a relaxed, mildly spacey under tone, which is quite pleasant.

Sorry if I blathered or didn't make sense, I actually just harvested a bunch of mugwort earlier, and the thujone or other undiscovered recreational element appears to (and this is not the first time this has happened) be able to be aabsorbed through the skin, and since I can estimate that I handled probably a quarter pound of it, I am at the point of having hallucinations (I looked over and my window was the garage door for a second) plus I am very tired.

Hope the information was somewhat useful.

Peace, and have fun growing/harvesting mugwort!