f33r

[-JKP-]

There are quite a few medieval herbals with head roots, fish roots, snake roots...

• After looking at a lot of fish roots, I realized that most of them stood for aquatic plants (once you recognize the plants it's easier to see what the roots mean).
  
• I discovered that snake/serpent/dragon roots had a lot of different meanings... sometimes it meant that the plant had "snake" in its name, or a snake-shaped root (like Bistorta). Sometimes it meant that the root was used to treat snake-bite. So, for snake roots, it was a little harder to tell why the snake was in the root unless you definitely knew the identity of the plant, but it was possible to figure out quite a few of them.
  

• The head roots were harder to distinguish as per meaning because a number of them were in manuscripts that lack plant labels or which appear to refer to mythical plants. Sometimes the head root looked like it might refer to the name of the plant, sometimes it looked like the head might refer to the moon rather than to a person. They were tougher to decipher than the fish roots and the snake roots.
  

I have a list of plants with head roots. I haven't seen Marco's examples yet and I can't take time to look up my files until after work, but I'll try to do that later.