Category — Medicinal plants

I’ve studied a lot of herbs and plants that are used for healing.

But I’ve always secretly known that all plants heal, that it restores my energy and turns my life around just to be with them, especially in the woods.

Turns out that my feeling that all plants heal is now a scientific fact. Or at least on its way to being one.

Besides generously providing us with that stuff of human life, oxygen, being surrounded by plants – any plants – seems to help people heal faster. A study at Kansas State University put plants in the recovery rooms of half their appendectomy patients. The patients in the rooms with plants healed faster.

In three days, “plant” patients had kicked their pain meds, while “sterile” patients were still on moderate doses. The plant-surrounded patients also had less fatigue and anxiety, lower heart rates and blood pressure.

For some of us, this one’s a no-brainer: I’ve always felt the sterile, all-artificial-materials environment of hospitals was a very hard place to heal. And any gardener or nature-lover has felt the healing powers of plants: it’s why we hang out with them, after all.

Older traditions of healing work on the assumption that plants have spirits and personalities; we can communicate with them for healing. I’m convinced that this, and not lucky guesswork, is the way human beings found the plants to stock our larders and medicine cabinets. But while I’m sure you get more benefits from a skilled understanding of how to communicate with plants, it seems that even total novices and unconscious people can take in their healing personalities.

I’m glad science is catching up with folk tradition.

Next post: Revelations from down under: Catmint grows native Californian sticky monkeyflower in Australia. Don’t miss this transhemispheric post.

Beds may be a natural place for sticky monkeyflower. According to the Flower Essence Society, sticky monkeyflower tinctures can be used for integrating human love and human sexuality; possibly some of the keys to this are the “facelike” flower,  more pointedly human (to some), and the orange color, color of the second chakra, which involves creative power of all kinds, including sexual. (Flower essences are homeopathic tinctures which address the emotions behind illnesses; they have no scent. They are often surprisingly effective where other remedies fail, and work well with other medications.)

The association of the flower with partnerships may also come from a salient plant fact: sticky monkeyflowers emerge in opposite pairs. Lots of them. The “double” meaning of one of its Latin names, Diplacus, is clear here.

Sticky monkeyflower is also used in the sickbed. The Miwoks used the root for diarrhea, dysentery, fevers, and hemorrhages. The leaves were made into a poultice for sores and burns, apparently having antiseptic qualities. This was important: in eras or places with no antibiotics, people could die of a septic cut.

The Miwoks had an aesthetic relationship with this plant, too. Flowers were used for wreaths, and put in children’s hair as ornaments. The back-to-the-landers in this area have used them the same way, but it’s a fleeting joy: sticky monkeyflower doesn’t last long off the bush, even if it’s in a vase with water.

Like snapdragons, monkeyflowers belong to the figwort family, which may be why they aren’t denuded by deer. Deer tend not to like members of the figwort family, a fine piece of news for those of us who garden in deer country. (You will have noticed that I wasn’t rash enough to say, Deer won’t eat monkeyflower. Deer will eat anything that grows, if they’re hungry enough.)

This unfurling bud shows sticky monkeyflower’s relationship to foxgloves and snapdragons. The snoutlike buds are very similar on all three flowers.

Sticky monkeyflower does attract bees and happily drunken hummingbirds, though, a big bonus in the garden. Another bonus: sticky monkeyflower is happy in serpentine soils, not the easiest type to grow plants in.

Given their beauty and deer resistance, I think sticky monkeyflower is a beautiful candidate for a low-water azalea substitute. It has the same low bushy form (it never gets more than knee-high, and usually only goes up to your shins), and the same striking display of bright flowers in spring. Liz Simpson  shows a beautiful example of sticky monkeyflower planted with native penstemon, for a gorgeous low-water spring display.

In moister, milder climates, sticky monkeyflower can bloom through the summer. While they are designed for dry rocky cliffs, clearly sticky monkeyflower has some variability in where it chooses to settle. Not only is there a coastal version of this plant, there are reports of it blooming in cool, foggy, rainy Castro Valley, San Francisco. It’s even doing well in at least one garden in  Bellevue, (in the cool part of Washington state).

Some gardeners recommend watering sticky monkeyflower once a month, for a fuller, more floriferous plant. (Most natives need to be watered somewhat through their first season, while their roots establish themselves.) Eje   at Dave’s Garden says that if you do that, it’s a good idea to hold off on the water at the end of the season, to encourage the plants into the dormancy they’d have in the wild. Of course in my area, where they grow naturally, it rains in the winter (the time they’re dormant). I’m not sure if this is a difference in sticky monkeyflower subspecies (makes a case for the splitters) or a clever idea for tricking the plant into dormancy where there is no winter cold.

While all this is beginning to sound like a lot of trouble, most gardeners who grow it stress how easy sticky monkeyflower is, and how tolerant of different conditions. I get the impression that these gardeners love the plant so much, they just want to help it show off its best.

The hard part may be getting  hold of sticky monkeyflower plants.  Like most wild plants, sticky monkeyflower doesn’t transplant well. Don’t dig it up, unless you’re ten minutes ahead of a bulldozer. That’s the only situation where you’re giving the plant more of a chance than it would have had if you hadn’t jumped in. Transplanting usually kills it.

If you want sticky monkeyflower, you must either save seed or get it from a native plant sale, or online from Las Pilitas Nursery . Las Pilitas is one of the authoritative sites which lists it as Diplacus auranticus and has some subspecies, with full explanations of their plant community and growing conditions. (If you have other sources for this plant,  please let us know. Since Catmint found it in her garden in Australia, it’s obviously got some  far-reaching conduits out of here.)

If you want to try growing your own, the easiest way to get the seed is to put a small paper bag over the almost-ripe pod. It’s always good to check the spot where it grows, so you can give the plant what it wants in your own garden: what’s the soil like? Drainage? Plant community? Sun exposure? After you gather this info, leave, then return when the seeds are ripe. The bag keeps the tiny seeds from falling irretrievably into the dust. The best time to sow seed is when nature does: in time to catch the fall and winter rains.

CApoppy at Dave’s Garden reports success from taking cuttings, something which I never even thought of trying. Root in early fall for planting in spring, is CApoppy’s advice, and you can cut it back in spring to keep it less leggy. Capoppy also suggests a remarkable-sounding combination; sticky monkeyflower with a maroon and apricot Pacific Coast hybrid iris, which presumably has the same low water requirements.

I haven’t grown this wildling in my garden (although writing this post is making me wonder why. Then I remember: I don’t have much sun. Oh yeah, that’s why.) . I hope those of you who have more experience at growing woody plants from seed and cuttings will speak up about your own methods.

(Nancy, this is the closest to the growing-off-the-cliff thing that I’ve got.)

References:

Tracy I. Stone and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963

Theodore R. Niehaus, Sierra Wildflowers: Mt. Lassen to Kern Canyon, University of California Press, 1974

National Park Service, California, wildflower page

http://davesgarden.com

I think we’ve gotten so used to forysthia we often forget to look at it. Some people are so bored by it, they don’t want to look at it.

But forsythia is worth looking at closely, for its ancient history and medicinal uses, and for its own sake in the present, paying special attention to how the light radiates through its massed petals. Forsythia makes a cheering blaze against a stormy sky, and a radiant force in sunlight.

(

Forsythia, named for English plantsman William Forsyth, must have had many names before we got to it: it’s a longstanding staple of the Chinese materia medica (list of medicinal remedies). While we plant forsythia for the flowers, forsythia was probably originally cultivated as a medicinal plant (or maybe for both reasons; before the concept of ornamental gardens, people didn’t feel obliged to make that distinction). The medicinal part of forsythia is its inconspicuous fruit. It’s a traditional Chinese remedy for all kinds of overheating: toxins, fever, swollen lymph glands, flus, and other inflamations. It’s also used to relieve carbuncles (staph abscesses that go deeper and get larger than boils) .

If you want to experiment with forsythia fruit tea, pick the fruit while it’s green.  But that’s just beginning of the process. Chinese herbology, unlike European herbology, wasn’t interrupted by a few hundred years of practitioners being burned, tortured, and otherwise persuaded not to pursue their art. So Chinese herbology has had the time to develop highly complex ways of extracting active herbal ingredients. Here’s what one Chinese materia medica recommends for processing gardenia fruit: “The green fruit gathered in the period of White Dew (fifteenth solar term) is better than the yellow fruit picked in the period of Cold Dew (seventeenth solar term). The fruit is steamed, dried in the sun, and its seeds separated from the flesh.” (TCM Basics)
Combined with other herbs, forsythia fruit is part of formulas for a number of what the Chinese call heat-related conditions (interesting in a plant that’s famous for blooming while it’s still cold). Forsythia is contraindicated where there is deficient yin, or spleen disorders. Mixed with honeysuckle flowers and ground into a powder (yep, plain old ubiquitous Hall’s honeysuckle), forsythia fruit can be used for what western medicine calls upper respiratory tract infections, acute bronchitis, acute endometriosis, measles, acute tonsilities, encephalitis B, meningitis, and parotitis - as well as the ever-present flu.
The variety of forsythia that’s used medicinally is Forsythia suspensa, the weeping forsythia. I’m honestly not sure if the pictures on this post are F. suspensa or something else; it’s my neighbor’s bush, and it was there before she moved in, so she has no way of finding out. It isn’t a particularly weeping form, but there is a variety of F. suspensa, ‘Fortunei’ (most likely named after Robert Fortune, the Royal Horticulturalist Society’s plant collector in 1840s China) which is more upright, and F. suspensa does seem to be the popular choice for specimen (as opposed to hedge) planting. If there are any forsythia experts out there, please let me know.

References:

The World in Your Garden, Camp, Boswell, and Magness, National Geographic Society, 1957

Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Complete Home Medical Guide, Montague Books, 1985

Sacred Lotus

TCM Basics

Your Nature, Your Health: Chinese Herbs in Constitutional Therapy, S. Dharmananda, Ph.D., Institute for Traditional Medicine and Preventive Health Care, 1986

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Co., 1973 (there are many useful editions of this book)

What if I told you about an easy-care groundcover that integrates plants beautifully in containers and in the ground in early spring, then dies off to leave space for warm-weather annuals? What it I also added that it’s a plant long treasured by herbalists for its nutritious, healing qualities?

Then what if I told you it was chickweed?

Familiarity breeds contempt, and this European plant from the pink family has made itself at home worldwide, in every kind of climate. I have never planted chickweed, and I have never needed to. Chickweed can produce five generations in a season, and its tiny little star-flowers make lots of seeds.

To some, this means it is simply an invasive pest, to be rooted out. To me, it just goes to prove that maxim, “a weed is a plant that’s in the wrong place.”  While others place it squarely in the pest department (any garden-book writeups seem to talk only about getting rid of it), chickweed is always welcome in my garden. It’s pretty, it doesn’t take over, and it gives me a healing spring treat when I pull it out,. And it’s really easy to pull: about three seconds to clear an area of a few square feet.

This means that chickweed also fits well into the low-water garden: instead of replacing it with hot-weather annuals that you have to water, use it as a groundcover for spring bulbs, then leave chickweed and bulbs unwatered for the summer, the way they like it, for an easy-care seasonal show.

The groundcover technique works in pots, too. Chickweed ties things together and makes sense of the jumble of bulbs in this pot, making it into a tiny landscape. I often have such pots, consisting of small bulbs and offsets that need to grow to flowering size. (I don’t throw bulbs away. I figure if they can reproduce in nature, and in the fields of bulb propagators, I should be able to figure out a way to get them to do it here. Sometimes that actually works. But I always live in hope, so I have a lot of pots of random small bulbs.) Without the chickweed, these pots are no works of art; they just have a tangle of assorted foliage from whatever bulbs I stuck in there.

Even with a container monocrop, chickweed is (as its name might imply) stellar. Notice how the little white asterisks of chickweed blooms complement and echo this pot of ‘L’Innocence’ hyacinth.

Chickweed itself is worth some aesthetic appreciation. Euell Gibbons describes it in detail in Stalking the Healthful Herbs: “You will see a single line of tiny hairs running up one side of the stem. When this line reaches the leaves, it continues up the opposites side of the stem to the next pair, alternating the side of the stem on which it chooses to travel at each pair of leaves. ”

And while I’d noticed the tiny star-like flowers closing at night, and on rainy days, I hadn’t noticed what Gibbons saw at the close of evening: “…the paired leaves approach one another so their upper surfaces fold over the tender, developing butds in their axils, and the outermost pair of fully developed leaves envelop the terminal bud as though trying to protect the tender, growing shoot. ”

But chickweed is more than just beautiful in my eyes. Gibbons points out the nutritious qualities; he cooks it in with other vegetables, and uses it in what he calls a Green Drink, a blendered health drink involving mostly herbs. Many people in my area make this kind of drink, but most of the time I prefer using my herbs in tastier ways. Chickweed isn’t particularly delicious, but it’s not bad, either; sort of bland and juicy and crunchy. Sometimes I make it into a tea with other garden foliage (fresh leaves must be simmered gently, covered, for ten minutes to extract the goodies). Sometimes I throw it in salad (I particularly like it in potato salads, but it doesn’t keep well, so it’s best to use it as a garnish at the last minute.) Sometimes I eat the crunchy stems and leaves just as they are, from the garden.

That’s the way chickens like to eat it, so much, apparently, that they gave this plant its most common common name. Other common names are: Mouse-ear, Satinflower, Starweed, Tongue Grass, White Bird’s-eye, Winterweed.

Winterweed, of course, means that it’s a plant which can be used year-round in many areas. Herbalists took advantage of its high vitamin C content; it’s another scurvy-preventing herb, like miner’s lettuce and strawberry leaves. It also has cooling qualities that may be useful in fevers or as poultices on inflammations and itches. (It’s also very juicy, which makes it easy to use as an emergency poultice for a bug bite or sore. Just mash it between your fingers, or between two rocks, and put it on the affected place.)

Herbalist David Hoffman says that this kind of poultice can even help eczema and psoriasis, while Gibbons points out that the old herbalist’s advice to wash wounds or sores in cool chickweed tea might mean that chickweed has antibiotic qualities.

Some herbalists credit chickweed with additional healing abilities; they use it for colds, coughs, tumors, hemorrhoids, sore eyes, and rheumatism. Others claim it’s useless. My best guess is that many of the benefits of chickweeed have to do with high mineral and vitamin content. Cutting-edge nutritional science is finding out something herbalists have known for centuries: a significant amount of illness stems from vitamin or mineral deficiency, or at least is complicated by it.  But not everyone responds the same way to the same treatment; people’s chemistry differs wildly.  Chickweed may well work for some and not for others.

To me, chickweed is beautiful, nutritious, and the ultimate in easy care. Scoff if you will; it will remain one of the quiet mainstays of my garden.

References:

Magic and Medicine of Plants,  Reader’s Digest Association, 1986

Stalking the Healthful Herbs, Euell Gibbons, David MacKay Co. , Inc, 1966

The Herbal Handbook, David Hoffman, Healing Arts Press, 1988

Theoretically, alpine strawberries are a wonderful match for a woodland garden. But after a decade or so, I’m still waiting for mine to prove it. Alpine strawberries, so the story goes, don’t need as much sun to bloom and fruit. In fact, according to the writeups, they need some shade to thrive. Yellow alpines have berries less attractive to birds, less likely to be marauded. And, since I’d had “white” alpine strawberries (really a pale primrose yellow) from the garden of a market gardener (who rightly only allowed us a few out of one of his highest-paying crops), I knew they tasted great.

Many catalogues carry alpine strawberry seeds instead of the plants; I’ve never had any luck growing these, but I don’t claim to be an expert at growing from seed. (Lucky, that.) Which is why, after several tries, I was happy to find places where I could get a few starter plants (some of those resources are below. The original place where I got my own alpines no longer carries them). Having experimented with some of our local, rhizomous wild strawberries and found them slow going, I was happy to find some alpine strawberries with runners, because I thought I could propagate these more quickly.

Alpine strawberries are supposed to fruit all season, through the summer and fall. They are close to wild strawberries in their breeding, so the fruit and leaves are much smaller than the better-known commerical kinds. (The shape of the fruit is different, too; more like a tiny dunce cap than the fat wedges of store strawberries.) Some of them have runners; some spread by rhizomes. They’re hardy to about -20 degrees F (about -29 degrees C), or zone 5, according to the One Green World catalogue; zones 3 to 9. according to the Raintree catalogue. Rosalind Creasy says that alpine strawberries are good to zone 4; I would tend to trust her the most, since I know she has lots of experience as a hands-on gardener in regular people’s gardens, as opposed to nurseries with all the commercial equipment.

Creasy recommends dividing plants every three or four years for best production. Maybe that’s part of my problem; I have never done this. On the other hand, the plants have rarely looked crowded to me. And the plants she’s discussing appear to be the rhizomous strawberries, not the ones with runners; my theory has been that runners are runners, so I just heel in the new little plants-on-a-string the way Ruth Stout recommends, only in a less-organized fashion.

Creasy recommends morning sun for alpine strawberries, or filtered sun from high-branched trees; she warns against full or afternoon sun, which I have found does indeed burn the leaves. Good places for alpine strawberries are in rockeries, borders, and anywhere you need a quick-growing groundcover. I think they make a nice part of the transition garden, that edge where natives start to take over from imports. They take some summer water, though they aren’t nearly as thirsty as their big-fruited cousins, so be sure to plant alpine strawberries with natives that aren’t moisture hogs, but don’t mind some summer water.

After I gave up on growing strawberries in a strawberry pot for reasons of deadness,  I put them in some of my self-watering containers, where they have lingered, mostly berriless, to this day. They have copiously produced runners, though, possibly for lack of anything else to do in the shade. I don’t recall getting any berries out of either attempt at growing strawberries in a pot.

Some of the alpine strawberries in pots grew so vigorously that they crept over the edge, where they made several rosettes which managed to root themselves in the dry-summer ground. I’ve also grown a few in the ground on purpose, where they obligingly made a pleasant woodsy-looking groundcover, and more plants - but nary a berry. Since I give them the same fertilizers and foliar feeds that produce flowers in my other plants, I’m guessing lack of sun is the problem, though they do get that morning sun or filtered light that everybody seems to recommend. After all, that market gardener who sparked my alpine strawberry lust by feeding me a treasured few of his alpine strawberries - from berry plants that had plentiful fruit - well, that guy grew his alpine strawberries in full sun. It was in the Pacific Northwest, I grant you; their summers are mild. But still. This strengthens my theory that these berries actually need more sun than advertised. If you want berries, that is.

Even though I have only the leaves, they’re still useful. Strawberry leaves are among the winter-growing plants which have a high vitamin C content; vital in times when no other sources of vitamin C are available. Euell Gibbons devised a way to extract it by filling a blender with strawberry leaves, covering with water, then blending only until the leaves are fine-cut; he let the leaves soak in the water overnight (this continues the water extraction of vitamin C), and strained it in the morning. He recommended this in morning green drinks, or as a way to dilute frozen fruit juices.

Strawberry leaves have traditionally been used as an antiscorbutic - which means they’re effective against scurvy. Since scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency, it only makes sense.
My own method of getting the benefit out of strawberry leaves is to include them in what I call ‘garden tea’: leaves of whatever is plentiful at any given time. In winter, that’s usually lavender, sage, strawberry leaves, and violet leaves (which also contain vitamin C). I rub them between my hands until they’re bruised, then simmer them several minutes until the tea is bright chartreuse. Most people enjoy this tea, and it’s very enlivening.

Last fall, in yet another attempt to get some actual fruit, I transplanted the alpine strawberries into some plastic bulb bowls-I had a lot more than my original three plants. (Being an overzealous bulb freak, I also planted some Fritillaria meleagris alba in the same bowls, hoping their small white bells would fit in nicely, and that the strawberries would provide them with the moist, cool root run they prefer.) I set the bowls where they’ll get about half a day’s sun with afternoon shade, and gave them the fertilizing regime I’m giving everything over the fall and winter. We’ll see.

References and Resources:

Both catalogues are good sources for information on growing conditions and garden uses of these strawberries.

Raintree catalogue -  has not only the yellow alpine strawberries I planted, but now carries a (presumably really) white alpine strawberry plus two red ones. In addition, there other wild and wild-related strawberries for your delectation.

One Green World catalogue -  carries two kinds of alpines, different varieties than the ones offered by Raintree.

Rosalind Creasy,  The Gardener’s Handbook of Edible Plants, Sierra Club Books, 1986

Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back: a New Method of Mulch Gardening, orig. published Exposition Press, 1955, with many subsequent printings. The chapter on strawberries is “Love Will Find a Way”.