This month’s Study Group was all about Red Clover. Below is a summary from tonight’s class. For more information on Herbal Study Group, click on the link to the left.

This beautiful pinky purple flower is an attractor for native bumble bees (honey bees are too small to reach the nectar), feed for livestock and medicine for humans.

The delicious blossoms are known for their anti-cancer activity, especially when dealing with breast, ovarian and lymph cancers. She has an affinity for cysts, especially in the upper region of the body and works well when there are single cysts.

Full of vitamins and minerals (calcium, chromium, magnesium, iron, copper and phosphorus and vitamins A, B complex and C), this herb makes a wonderful daily infusion that is mildy sweet and satisfying. Try it iced for a cool summertime refreshment.

Tonight we had a chance to head to my local Red Clover patch and harvest a basketful. It went quickly with 5 extra hands helping! That harvest gave us fresh blossoms to make tea and tinctures for all to take home plus enough left over to fill my drying screens for infusion making later in the year.

Red Clover will continue to bloom through the summer but will taper back for awhile and bloom again in late summer. Because of this, she is often known as the herb that gives second chances though it is said the first blooming is superior to the second blooming.

Back in the house we talked about the differences between herbal infusions and teas and then got to sampling. To demonstrate dried herbs offer a higher mineral content than fresh herbs I had made infusions of each earlier in the day and let them steep for 8 hours. We also made a tea of both the fresh and dried blossoms, letting it steep for about 10 minutes. The results were amazing and varied! The dried infusion was dark in color, slightly sweet and mild tasting. The fresh infusion tasted like water even though it had sat for the same period of time. The coloring was also much lighter.

The teas were delightful, demonstrating that Red Clover makes a wonderful beverage tea. Both the fresh and dried were sweet though the dried was a bit stronger. The kids happily guzzled down our leftovers.

In addition to her anti-cancer properties, Red Clover is wonderful for treating coughs, especially irritable, drippy coughs such as coughs from Pertussis and Measles. She is useful for treating Mumps as well, working on the inflamed glands.

Red Clover has mild laxative, diuretic, alterative, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. She contains coumarin that can change to dicoumarin if the blossoms ferment during drying. This is because the coumarin can combine with a common mold that is found on Red Clover called Botrytis mold which if dried too slowly will ferment and turn to dicoumarin.

If you were unable to make tonight’s class, you are welcome to download tonight’s handout here. Feel free to share with others but please credit me with my work.

Want to learn more about Red Clover? You can purchase this month’s issue of Herbal Roots zine  Crazy for Clover which contains 35 pages of stories, songs, poems, games, puzzles, recipes, crafts and more, all focusing on Red Clover for only $7.99.

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One of the best things about herbs is their ability to heal, even when used as food. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart and one I have recently begun embracing wholeheartedly, so much so that when I heard my good friend John over at LearningHerbs.com had created a Culinary Herbalism Course with natural healing specialist K. P. Kalsa, I got very excited.

(this is part 2 of a 10-part series, a life’s journey to become an herbalist observing gail faith edward’s article on the subject. you can find part 1 here.)

gail’s second step in her ten-fold path is to pay attention, observe and concentrate. she says:

“I have lived on this ridge-top herb farm for over thirty years. The thing about living in one place for a long time is that you get to notice things. And you have plenty of time and activity behind you to base observations on. It takes a long time to notice some things; like how plants move naturally across a field, on their own, over a thirty year span. Or the length of time it took your usnea tincture to turn orange the last few times you made it. Observation is one of the most important skills of an herbalist. Whether you are or aspire to be a wildgatherer and medicine maker, a clinical herbalist or herbal nutritionist, whatever your particular herbal path is, you will need to develop keen observation skills. How do you do that? By paying attention.

An herbalist must pay constant attention to life. All of life and life processes. One way to do that is by tending a garden over many years. Goethe said that he spent his whole life in the garden and thus discovered the entire world. Start seeds and watch them grow. Welcome the same plant stands back year after year. Notice everything about your plants in every season. Notice their effects on people, animals, insects, other plants, the soil, the air. Visit your garden often, taking time to breath deeply, smell deeply, see deeply, listen deeply, relax deeply. Breathe from your heart. Watch the bees and butterflies, feel the breeze.”

although i’ve only been on this farmette for 6 years, i have observed more activity and changes with the flora than i probably have a lifetime of living at any other place. i have observed the plants moving slowly across the garden as well as plants that completely moved to the other side of our property and start growing where they never existed before as well as plants disappear completely from the landscape.

this year, i learned there are at least 3 wild varieties of rose growing on our property simply by taking regular walks that i didn’t bother to do in the past. i observed that the multiflora rose blooms sooner than the rugosa rose and the 3rd unidentified rose. i’ve watched small elder plants mature enough to start producing fruits, my own st. john’s wort completely disappear from my garden and jewelweed slowly creeping closer onto our property.

i’ve also noticed different growth patterns and plants emerging sooner than usual or later than usual. i got to see my peony plant bloom for the first time since i’ve lived here. also, nettles appeared for the first time after hopefully searching for them over the past 6 years. this year they flourished as if they had always grown there.

(this is part 1 of a 10-part series, a life’s journey to become an herbalist observing gail faith edward’s article on the subject),

gail’s first step in the ten-fold path is to build a sense of place:

“The cultivation of a deep sense of place is invaluable for an herbalist. We all emerge out of an eco system, a bioregion, we are all connected elementally, as well as ethereally, to our surroundings, to our place. Understanding this sense of place and how it relates to plants and people is an important part of the herbalist’s path. It is often overlooked, as when a woman in northeastern America is offered an herb that grew in South Africa as a remedy for her ills. Cultivate a sense of place, its critical to understanding the actions as well as possible effects of combining individual plants and people.”

this one is dear to my heart but for a different reason. i completely believe in using herbs from my region but i more have considered it because of 1. teaching people to be self healers and confidence starts with being able to show them herbs that grow in their own backyards and are easy to recognize and 2. if the end of the world as we know it were to happen, we would not be able to get an exotic herb so instead of trying the latest and greatest, i feel it’s better to stick with what we have at our fingertips.

being able to take advantage of the abundance in our own back yards, local parks, woods and wild places is one of the best things we as herbalists can do and teach. during the summer, my herbal study group includes herb walks so i can show plants that i cultivate in my garden and plants that grow on their own in the wild. this includes natives and invasives. invasives are here to stay whether we like it or not so we might as well take advantage of their medicine that they offer and use them. it will keep them in check as well.

taking daily walks is a great way to have a sense of space. i try to take note of what i discover growing in the wild, where it is growing (shade, full sun, near water, along fence row, in pathway), what the conditions are like (spring, summer, fall, winter) and what stage of grow it is in (flowering, fruiting, dying back) for future reference. i have finally dedicated a watercolor spiral bound book just for my walks to keep note in and hope to fill it with my notes, sketches and possibly even a few photographs as time goes on. this will allow me to track the changes of plant species growing, what comes, what goes, and when. i’ve lived on this land for 6 years and already i’ve seen big changes to the flora.

while i view this home as a temporary place, a sort of transition to my future forever home, my roots go deep into the earth in this area and for now, this is my place in life. i love to nurture and urge plants to grow here and teach me all they can. for now, my sense of place is here and i will continue to offer what i can to the plants and people of my community.

gail faith edwards wrote an article awhile back about the ten-fold path to becoming a community herbalist in response to an article that paul bergner wrote. most of them tie in nicely with quaker testimony so i plan to try to incorporate them into my daily living. here is a brief outline of the 10 things she feels are important to become a community herbalist:

1 – Sense of Place

2 – Pay Attention – Observation. Concentration

3 – Become humus. Humble yourself

4 – Learn to open your wild heart, connect with your inner wild nature

4 – Herbal Ally

5 – Study, study, study

6 – Simplify your life

7 – Cultivate your spirituality

8 – Listen to your clients

9 – Be your own refuge

10 – Practice learning

over then next few weeks,  i hope to write a bit about each item and what i’m doing or plan to start to deepen my learning as a community herbalist.

Editor’s note:

Today we are excited to have a guest herbal columnist on our site today. Kiva Rose is a well-known herbal blogger, and co-founder of the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference.

Kiva is finally coming out with her secrets of how she learns so much about plants without using books. Her plant monographs, like the one below, are famous for their deep exploration into herbs that you will not find in other places.

Click here to learn just HOW she does it.

Do you REALLY know chamomile? Review what you’ve learned this summer about it with this article. Enjoy the article…

Earth Apple: The Bittersweet Medicine of Chamomile

By Kiva Rose

I am excited to finally be able to go deeper into explaining herbal energetics in my upcoming course, Herb Energetics.

Let’s begin with an herb we all know and love, chamomile.

However, do you REALLY know Chamomile?

Chamomile means “earth apple” which is easy to understand when we accidentally trample the flowers and underfoot and suddenly smell the welcome fragrance of apples rising from the earth. In the same way, Spanish speaking peoples often use the name Manzanilla, literally meaning “little apple”.

Even for those largely unfamiliar with herbs, the distinctive sweet scent of Chamomile is often both familiar and comforting. This plant is many people’s first and perhaps only introduction to herbalism, often from a cup of honey-sweetened and belly-calming tea from their grandmother.

Many children enjoy eating the buds or just opened flowers, savoring the sweet aromatic taste of the plant, and rarely seeming to mind the slightly bitter aftertaste. Some patches of Chamomile, depending on phase of flowering and availability of moisture, are much more bitter than others but the fragrant sweetness persists even in the most bitter batches.

Far from irrelevant, these signature sensory characteristics of Chamomile that make the plant memorable in our minds are also the primary keys to understanding how to work with Matricaria as a medicine.

As with almost any herb, the taste and scent of Matricaria tells us a great deal about its properties, allowing us to use our senses to listen to the plant and understand its essence as a medicine. That blissfully apple-like scent that children so love to breathe in from the flowers tends to bring relaxed smiles to their faces and anyone who’s ever drank a cup of the tea can testify to the relaxing, tension alleviating effects of the plant.

That aromatic component, stemming from the plant’s high volatile oil content, is predictably nervine, meaning that it has a discernible effect on the nervous system. In this case, a specific relaxing, calming effect. Additionally, that same volatile oil content is responsible for Chamomile’s actions as a carminative, relieving digestive stagnation in the form of gas, gut cramping and mild constipation. A traditional remedy by several North American indigenous tribes for the uterine cramps of girls just beginning their menstrual cycles, Chamomile is a mild relaxant for the smooth muscles of the gut, uterus, bladder and respiratory tract with a specific affinity for the gut.

Matricaria is not just aromatic, even in the sweetest Chamomile flowers we find a notably bitter aftertaste. Rather than ruining the flavor of an otherwise tasty herb, that bitter element enhances and expands the medicinal properties of the plant. The bitter flavor tells us that it has a distinct effect on the digestive system, even beyond the aromatic/carminative qualities.

The bitterness increases the secretion of digestive juices and enzymes in the gut, thereby improving digestion wherever there is a lack of secretions, which is a common cause of heartburn and many cases of general gut discomfort. This combined with its obvious nervine properties; Matricaria excels at treating what is commonly known as a “nervous stomach”, which generally implies digestive upset concurrent with anxiety and nervous tension.

Volatile oils and bitter principles together make for a powerful ability to reduce inflammation and promote healing, especially in the gut. I rarely create a formula for those with leaky gut, irritable bowel syndrome or even Crohn’s disease that doesn’t contain some proportion of Chamomile. Even as a simple, this pleasant tasting plant can very effectively reduce gut inflammation, pain and cramping while promoting healing of the mucosa and improving overall digestion. And of course, reducing any anxiety that may be aggravating or triggering the gut issues in the first place.

Just as it soothes and heals internally, Matricaria is also a first-rate external application for almost any case of inflammation, irritation, swelling and even potential infection. It finds its way into many of my compress formulas for eczema, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis and other common inflammatory skin conditions.

Steams, baths and infused oil are other effective ways of utilizing the calming, decongestive and healing properties of the herb. It’s also the first plant I think of in addressing the discomfort, irritability, insomnia, belly upset and fever of teething in small children.

Chamomile is one of my favorite remedies for all sorts of eye inflammations and infections. It can be used as a warm compress or saline eyewash to reduce inflammation, possible infection and pain in the treatment of styes, conjunctivitis, pink eye and similar maladies.

It teams up especially well with any Rosa spp. petals where there is a great deal of redness, irritation and swelling in the eye and the surrounding area. Just be sure to strain all those tiny (and potentially irritating) bits of Chamomile flower before using as an eyewash.

Chamomile has a well-deserved reputation as an archetypal remedy for children (or as Matthew Wood says “children of any age”), especially where there is fussiness, restlessness, frequent digestive upset and a tendency to react strongly to any irritant or discomfort. If one were to read the first dozen monograph on Matricaria they came across, the word “soothing” would be likely to show up in nearly every one. While now a somewhat clichéd representation of this common herb, it is nonetheless very accurate.

There’s a tendency by some of us to be less interested in the classic gentle herbs whose effects seem obvious, mild and less than profound. And yet, Chamomile has retained it’s popularity and reputation over the years for a very a specific reason. It works. It’s an effective, widely applicable, safe medicine well-loved by countless generations of mothers, herbalists and more recently, even medical doctors. This small but fragrant apple of the earth remains an invaluable medicine for all of us. Through both sweet and the bitter tastes, Chamomile provides us with a simple yet essential remedy.

Considerations: People with sensitivities to plants in the Aster family may have similar problems with Matricaria. Also note that Pineapple Weed (M. discoidea) often has a stronger bitter component and overall action than the common garden grown M. recutita.

The low down…

Common Name: Chamomile, Manzanilla, Pineapple Weed

Botanical Name: Matricaria recutita (as well as M. discoidea)

Botanical Family: Asteraceae

Taste: Aromatic, sweet, bitter

Vital Actions: relaxant nervine, relaxant diaphoretic, aromatic bitter/carminative, vulnerary,

Specific Indications: Irritability, tension, heat, hypersensitivity to pain

Energetics: sl. Cool, dry

So, exactly how does Kiva learn about plants by using her senses?

Just click here.

July’s Herbal Sprouts Workshop was all about Lemon Balm! What a refreshing herb to learn about today in the heat of summer.

We made popsicles:

We made lemon balm lip balm:

We sang songs:

We acted out the story of Lemon Balm:

We colored and created and learned all about lemon balm:

The next Herbal Sprouts Workshop will be on Tuesday, August 10th from 10am – 2pm and is all about Peppermint. For more information, go to our meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/Herbal-Study-Group/calendar/13711517/

This month’s Blog Party is hosted by me! The topic is Beating the Heat of Summer with Herbs. Anything to do with the sun is game! Sunscreens, sunburn treatment, heat exhaustion and just keeping your cool with herbs are some things that come to mind. For more ways to beat the heat, see the bottom of my post for other herbalists’ posts on the topic!

Earlier this morning, my partner was suffering from a mild case of heat exhaustion. One of the first things I did for him was make him a mix of homemade electrolytes to drink:

1 1/2 teaspoons sea salt (i used Himalayan pink)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons raw honey
1 quart water

While not very appetizing, it is helpful for getting the body back into balance. The flavor could be enhanced by making a tea from peppermint which is beneficial for treating heat exhaustion (see below).

The most important thing to do when suffering from heat exhaustion is to get the body temperature back down and the body rehydrated. Lying in a cool room, misting yourself with a water bottle and/or placing a cool, damp washcloth on the back of your neck are all very helpful for cooling the body temperature. Drinking the electrolyte drink helps to rehydrate the body and bring it back into balance since sweating can cause the body to lose important minerals.

Symptoms of heat exhaustion include:

• Heavy sweating
• Fatigue
• Headache
• Pale, clammy skin
• Thirst
• Rapid heartbeat
• Dizziness, fainting
• Nausea, vomiting
• Muscle cramps
• Mild temperature elevations

If the body temperature goes above 104 degrees F, risk of heat stroke is great so it is important to get the body cool.

To treat his symptoms and give him some comfort while he was recuperating, I made a tea of peppermint and ginger and added some meadowsweet tincture. This tea not only treated the symptoms but was also helpful for correcting the root of the problem. Peppermint and ginger are long known to treat nausea and upset stomachs. Ginger is high in potassium and magnesium and peppermint is high in calcium, magnesium and potassium, all of which are needed when treating heat exhaustion.  Peppermint is cooling which is helpful for bringing down the body’s temperature. Ginger also has cooling properties, by causing the body to sweat which lowers the body temperature. Since I didn’t necessarily want him to sweat some and lose more water, I waited until the tea cooled down to have him drink it which would negate some of the sweating properties of the tea.

Meadowsweet is great for treating headaches. It contains salicylic acid which is what aspirin was created from. It is also gentle on the stomach and makes a great companion for treating combinations of headaches and stomachaches.

By the time he had finished the tea and electrolytes, he was feeling much better. While heat exhaustion is nothing to fool around with, if caught soon enough and treated quickly, the situation is easy to reverse. Prevention is always the best medicine! Not working during the heat of the day on strenuous activities, or stopping work when you start to feel overheated, wear loose, lightweight clothing, drinking plenty of fluids (adding a pinch of sea salt to your water is important because replacing fluids with just water is not enough) that are cool but not icy and wearing a damp bandana or washcloth around your neck are all ways to help prevent heat exhaustion.

And now for some more herbalists’ articles on the topic of Beating the Heat of Summer:

Sean wrote about herbal first aid for heat exhaustion

Rosalee wrote a lovely article on making chamomile popsicles

Kristena of Dreamseeds wrote a great article full of fun tips for keeping cool, including using essential oils and a reminder about drinking cold, alcoholic beverages this time of the year

Karen Vaughn wrote about cooling summer herbal beverages and lists her top 10 favorite summertime drinks

Cory wrote about a nifty trick to help keep cool using flax seeds

Herban Chica wrote about her favorite summer tea

Keep checking back. I’ll add more posts as they become ready!