# Your Favorite Healing Plant



## Dahc (Feb 14, 2006)

Since we lost so much useful data about medicinal plants, maybe I could entice others to post the healing plants that they use in everyday life. Not what we buy from walmart, I mean the stuff we harvest ourselves.

I have recently learned that wild lettuces have a pain relieving effect and I have a ton of it on the property. I made a tea and it did help with some recurrent pain that I have.

I also attribute my heart health to the wild garlic I grow along with onion. It seems like I can still depend on my heart even if my other organs have some problems...lol.

What do you eat or drink that you harvest yourself that helps your body?

Please don't tell us what you smoke from your yard. We don't need to know all that.


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## woodspirit (Aug 3, 2005)

Valerian Officianalis is great if you are feeling stressed out or just want to be really relaxed. It has white flowers, not the purple flowered annual Valerian. This is perennial. There is another valerian called red valerian which is also called Jupiters Beard. It is not that one either. Altough the red one has really great color and the foliage color is a nice too. I like to chew a twig of sweet birch when I walk about the woods too.


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## Bee_Rain (Jun 15, 2004)

What a great thread!

I spent alot of last summer and fall collecting; sage-for spiritual reasons: catnip-for colds, boil dry catnip or any mint in a pot, throw a towel over your head and inhale the fumes:Mullien (I use it as a smuge to inhale for bronchial problems, or can be used as a tea but not as effective) and Bergamot: In the same family as mint but is better flavored for a tea, used for colds and stomach ailments.

Being out in Nebraska for the last 2 years has been a challenge as far as finding wild medicinal plants...


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## Nancy in Maine (Jun 24, 2002)

Lemon Balm and Hyssop. 

The lemon balm, when made into a tincture is wonderful for heartburn or indigestion. A few years back, I was experimenting and wondered if I could make a lemon flavoring with lemon balm as the smell was sooo wonderful when fresh. Was I worng! It has a slimy tea flavor and sat in my cupboard for months until I tried it as a stomach aid. One day I had indigestion and took Tums. Then another Tums. Then some alka seltzer. Nothing was working. So I tried a teaspoon of the lemon balm tincture. It was a miracle! I'm running low on my tincture and have already ordered more seeds. 

The hyssop, also in tincture form, seems to be good for help in fighting off a cold. 

I too use valerian and hops as a sleep aid on occasion.


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

I am working on a large electronic notebook of herbs I know and use in the Ozarks, some also in the Poconos, Smokies, Adirondacks, and Missouri generally. It has original artwork, is based on years of notes, and has a lot of references. I would love to get feedback on it, but I need somewhere to put it. I can turn it into a PDF or HTML very easily, but it is about 4 MB and growing rapidly.

Any thoughts?


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## boondockers (Mar 6, 2006)

withania sommnifera Ashwaganda... IT is an adaptagen it will help with lots of ailments look it up on the net. Very useful herb. :rock: :rock:


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## MELOC (Sep 26, 2005)

mihal said:


> I am working on a large electronic notebook of herbs I know and use in the Ozarks, some also in the Poconos, Smokies, Adirondacks, and Missouri generally. It has original artwork, is based on years of notes, and has a lot of references. I would love to get feedback on it, but I need somewhere to put it. I can turn it into a PDF or HTML very easily, but it is about 4 MB and growing rapidly.
> 
> Any thoughts?


do you have any online storage? you could make your own webpage. then you could charge to download or ask for donations or even add advertisements on the site.

my isp, comcast.net, gives me free online storage and a webpage.


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

MELOC said:


> do you have any online storage? you could make your own webpage. then you could charge to download or ask for donations or even add advertisements on the site.
> 
> my isp, comcast.net, gives me free online storage and a webpage.


Not that I am aware of, no (small town ISP). There is a Yahoo group I might be able to store it on ...


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## Wildcrofthollow (Apr 20, 2005)

Boneset is by far my favorite cold, flu, fever reducer
Peppermint and Wild Ginger(Asarum) are my favorite adulterants to make things taste better. (Peppermint grows wild on my place it was planted by the original homesteaders who settled there)
Sassafrass just makes me feel good.
Elderflowers for headaches
Spicebush makes me feel good as well, mild diaphoretic.
Both my wife and myself are herbalists, now that we have all this knowledge about plant medicines we seem to hardly ever get sick anymore. I guess you just start paying attention to what you eat, and get enough sleep and you stay pretty healthy. At least it seems to have worked that way for us.
hmm what else?
Blackberry root for diarrhea
We forage as much wild food as we can get. The vitamins and minerals available in wild plants are so good for you.
We keep a very full pharmacopia, but the above are the things we seem to use the most, at least of things that we harvest from the woods.
We use a good bit of chamomile which we buy.


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

Wildcrofthollow said:


> Boneset is by far my favorite cold, flu, fever reducer
> Peppermint and Wild Ginger(Asarum) are my favorite adulterants to make things taste better. (Peppermint grows wild on my place it was planted by the original homesteaders who settled there)
> Sassafrass just makes me feel good.
> Elderflowers for headaches
> ...


Root? I use the leaves myself. I did not know the roots could also be used. Is the root particularly better? It does hurt the plant a bit more.


> We forage as much wild food as we can get. The vitamins and minerals available in wild plants are so good for you.
> We keep a very full pharmacopia, but the above are the things we seem to use the most, at least of things that we harvest from the woods.
> We use a good bit of chamomile which we buy.


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## woodspirit (Aug 3, 2005)

I would be careful with the Sassafras. While the leaves are a good mosquito repellant, It has been shown to have a carcinogen in it, so I wouldn't drink it myself. 
Wild strawberry leaves will fix diarrhea instantly. Not the cultivated kind.
Spicebush tea is excellent. You take a handful of the small stems and simmer them. Traditional Cherokee morning drink. The berries are used in cakes too.


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

woodspirit said:


> I would be careful with the Sassafras. While the leaves are a good mosquito repellant, It has been shown to have a carcinogen in it, so I wouldn't drink it myself.


That was a poorly done study. The study actually resulted in a partial ban on use of sassafras in certain products. That ban has now been lifted.

There were two major problems with the research:

The study used pure sassafras (root) essential oil. This is not used commercially or in home use (tea, sarsparilla, filÃ©, etc) and the carcinogens are only extractable that way.
The amount of increase in cancer risk was hardly significant. One can of beer was more carcinogenic than several gallons of sassafras root beer even if the chemicals did somehow dissolve in the water.

I use sassafras in all forms with no worries.



> Wild strawberry leaves will fix diarrhea instantly. Not the cultivated kind.
> Spicebush tea is excellent. You take a handful of the small stems and simmer them. Traditional Cherokee morning drink. The berries are used in cakes too.


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## Dahc (Feb 14, 2006)

mihal said:


> That was a poorly done study. The study actually resulted in a partial ban on use of sassafras in certain products. That ban has now been lifted.
> 
> There were two major problems with the research:
> 
> ...


Maybe they were just using the same old safety for the american public as always. It's very obvious to any industrialised citizen of the NWO with any common sense at all, that deep woods off, in the airasol can, with all the extra goodies made in a lab is much better for you than a naturally occuring substance found in a plant..... right?

I don't mean to be so sarcastic but studies like that seem to make my underwear gather in the cra.... oh, forget I mentioned that... It just makes me so angry... Like medical mar. -->THEY'll<-- do anything to keep it out of the hands of cancer patients when it's been proven over and over and over to help the nausea of chemo and reduce pain... It's all about the ability to patent. They can't patent naturally occuring substances... so they're all BAD for you. They'll all make you die, they'll all give you cancer... but patented things... what a godsend. What in the world would we do without big business and pharmaceutical companies... How did man survive without them. I guess the world would over populate without them since pharm. meds are the fourth leading cause of death in the US.

MAN! Now I screwed up my thread with a rant! Sorry.


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

> MAN! Now I screwed up my thread with a rant! Sorry.


Yep, but I happen to agree.


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## Dahc (Feb 14, 2006)

woodspirit said:


> Valerian Officianalis is great if you are feeling stressed out or just want to be really relaxed. It has white flowers, not the purple flowered annual Valerian. This is perennial. There is another valerian called red valerian which is also called Jupiters Beard. It is not that one either. Altough the red one has really great color and the foliage color is a nice too. I like to chew a twig of sweet birch when I walk about the woods too.


Woodspirit,

The valerian, how do you administer this? I bought some from a store a few years back for sleep disorder and it didn't really do much. I just figured that I had gotten ahold of a poor product. Since then, I hear more and more people do well with valerian.

I have to take a sleep aid called trazadone which is a pretty high powered poison. It forces sleep on you rather than relaxing you but if I could relax, I could probably sleep.


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## Dahc (Feb 14, 2006)

mihal said:


> Not that I am aware of, no (small town ISP). There is a Yahoo group I might be able to store it on ...


I have Yahoo Geocities Pro which I use to put up my website. 2000 megs of storage and a bunch of bandwidth (can't remember the #). It's like 9$ a month and they waived the set-up fee (15$). I don't recommend Yahoo just because I couldn't get the page builder to work and had to learn HTML just to put my site up, but there are some other decent deals out there where you could run downloads with passwords to sell.

Another option is to get a free site and sell CD's you burn yourself. Or... you could do a combination of the two. Sell the download for a price, then offer a back-up CD for another small price but without protections, the first thing a person would do is burn their download to a CD themselves. I would sell either the CD or the download and not worry about all the other stuff.

That's just me though.


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## Wildcrofthollow (Apr 20, 2005)

Dahc, have you tried passionflower for a sleep aid? It seems to work pretty well for the folks I have suggested it to. I've used it and it does tend to make you relax. The nicest thing about it is that it doesn't screw up the rem period so you dream naturally. Btw why do you have trouble sleeping? For years I drank Coke for dinner, couldn't sleep. Never realized it was the Coke doing it. Stopped drinking soft drinks, started sleeping. Feel a lot better now, but do have one every now and then for old times sake, then end up staying awake half of the night.


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## Dahc (Feb 14, 2006)

Wildcrofthollow said:


> Dahc, have you tried passionflower for a sleep aid? It seems to work pretty well for the folks I have suggested it to. I've used it and it does tend to make you relax. The nicest thing about it is that it doesn't screw up the rem period so you dream naturally. Btw why do you have trouble sleeping? For years I drank Coke for dinner, couldn't sleep. Never realized it was the Coke doing it. Stopped drinking soft drinks, started sleeping. Feel a lot better now, but do have one every now and then for old times sake, then end up staying awake half of the night.


No, I've never tried that. I tried valerian and the meds. I hate meds. I don't do sodas although coffee has recently become a problem. I've had the problems for a long time. There was a long time that I never had any stimulants like caffiene (sp?) in me and I still had problems sleeping. My mind just goes zing, zing, ZING... all night long. I'm 36 and I know it's been happening for at least 20 years.

What is passionflower? I'll try and find something on it.


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## Frontierpoultry (Oct 14, 2005)

I'm going to cheat a little here but first I will say I really like the anti-oxidant characteristics of the wild blueberries and the low bush cranberries we have. The wild rose petals are also nice in the late summer and they all have so many uses. The thing I wanted to mention is a olive leaf extract called d-lenolate. It was brought to my attention when I had a VERY bad infection. I did the .....better go to the doctor thing and ended up with a antibiotic that after three days of use was all but killing me....no joke! I had to quit the antibiotic after three days, not a good thing to do, and ordered this d-lenolate stuff express mail. The infection was growing and I almost decided to be admitted. I took the first dose of d-lenolate 2 1/2 days after quiting the antibiotic. A while after taking it I got nauscous(sp?) I was told that was to be expected. I felt a little better after about day 2 and continued taking it for 3 weeks. I was amazed that something so simple could be so effective. I know this isn't quite what you wanted on your post but I had to share.


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

I use crushed burdock leaf (fresh) on nettles rash.


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## Hummingbird (Aug 21, 2002)

Excellent thread!!!

By boneset - do you mean comfrey?

I have an herb garden attached to my garage and I have in it and use:

several different mints for upset tummies, to ease a headache, to perk me up

several different lavenders for calming and potpouris, I also let one of the larger ones drape into the goldfish pond and it greatly reduces the algae

several thymes for culinary as well as colds and congestion

sage for the same

comfrey - just learning this one but love it for first-aid salves and bruises,

lemon balm, marjoram, salad burnet (tastes like cucumbers), soapwort (not sure what to do with it yet), roses, 

I know there's more out there but need to do another spring inspection and see what else is coming up.

I also have a large assortment of dried herbs in my cupboard that I've ordered online. 

My sleep tea blend is: equal parts of catnip, peppermint, passion flower, oat straw & chamomile. I don't really feel sleepy after drinking it but then when I go to bed, I just drift right off and sleep deeply.

I use a lot of my stuff also in my soaps & lotions.

Anybody ever studied the German Commission E book? Is it worth the $99 to buy it?

Thanks!

Nance


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## Wildcrofthollow (Apr 20, 2005)

Blackberry root is extremely effective for diarrhea. The leaves are not anywhere near as effective IMO.

No, Boneset is not comfrey. Boneset is Eupatorium perfoliatum, comfrey is Symphytum officinale (I think that is right for comfrey) They are two very different plants.
Boneset is primarily a febrifuge. It will help to lower fevers. You should not use it immediately upon getting sick, the body needs time to mount a fever and use it to kill off the baddies in your system. Use it on the second or third day of a fever. I have heard that the name "boneset" comes from this plants use in the control of dengue "breakbone" fever. I have also heard that it has been used to help to knit bones. I have used it at a fairly high dosage when I had a broken leg. The leg was healed in 3 weeks. I will not make the claim that the boneset did it, but I believe it did.
Neither myself nor my wife have been to see a doctor in more than 3 years. We would go if we felt we needed to, but the plants take good care of us. Herself is always making tinctures of something. I, personally am convinced that herbalism is the way to go. Now seriously, if you are in a bad car accident or something I would go to a medical doctor immediately, if you have a cold or flu or some other fairly normal malady, look to the plants, they can help.

my 2 cents


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

Dahc said:


> Since we lost so much useful data about medicinal plants, maybe I could entice others to post the healing plants that they use in everyday life. Not what we buy from walmart, I mean the stuff we harvest ourselves.
> <snip>


Probably my favorite herb is St. John's Wort. I do not use it that often, but I have tremendous respect for it. It is also decorative and always has a place in a herb-garden-but-does-not-look-like-an-herb-garden garden. I have a short article on St. John's Wort here that goes into detailed uses, dangers and references.


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

I use an infusion of fermented barley seeds and hop flowers to make lifes ills more bearable.

Does that count? :bouncy: :bouncy:


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## Dahc (Feb 14, 2006)

tinknal said:


> I use an infusion of fermented barley seeds and hop flowers to make lifes ills more bearable.
> 
> Does that count? :bouncy: :bouncy:


BOOZER!..... LOL!


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## woodspirit (Aug 3, 2005)

I forgot to mention beer. As for Valerian, I've only used the fresh or dried roots that I get from the garden. It smells like dirty socks, and it doesn't give you a buzz the way drugs do, but it does make you relaxed and mellow. You will be able to sleep easily but you won't feel like you are knocked down. You just feel less stressed and calmer. I've never tried to take it in high doses though. If I understand it right, the main ingredient in Valium was synthesized from Valerian but Valerian doesn't have side effects like Valium. I've never heard of being addicted to Valerian tea.
Interesting how the blackberries have the opposite effect of the rest of the plant. 
I can't stress enough that apples, carrots, collard greens, blueberries, and fruits and vegetables, including olive oil, are really good for health and taste so much better than drugs to treat ailments. Red Wine. If you want to enjoy the benefits of red wine you can take those red wine pills. What are they called? Oh yeah, grapes.


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## Sparticle (Nov 1, 2004)

mihal said:


> I am working on a large electronic notebook of herbs I know and use in the Ozarks, some also in the Poconos, Smokies, Adirondacks, and Missouri generally. It has original artwork, is based on years of notes, and has a lot of references. I would love to get feedback on it, but I need somewhere to put it. I can turn it into a PDF or HTML very easily, but it is about 4 MB and growing rapidly.
> 
> Any thoughts?


Still reading this thread and I can't wait to find out what you've decided to do with your research!

I have a question though and was going to start a new thread and then I casually saw this tread and thought this may be more appropriate.

in 1986 I was told I had Liver failure (I've since been told that what I was told wasn't possible given all the "facts" - so who knows)..... zoom forward 6 months later working at health food store. A native American man came in and saw me surround by books (not real busy at the health food store) and obviously doing research on herbs. I was looking for a liver tonic or cleanser or just anythign to help keep my liver safe. He asked me why I was reading so many books. I told him. He told me to go find the bark of the Huisache tree, boil it and drink the tea. It took me a while to find the spelling because I thought it was wesatch. He told me the location of one but it was behind a barbed wire high fence and I never did it. It's come to my mind lately and I looked online tonight and found nothing about that. I did find something about using the flowers for colds though. I also found that the tree is also called a Sweet Acacia.

Anyone know about this?

edit: changed my search request on google and found this. but too tired to look up the words I don't know. I'll read more tomorrow
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Acacia+farnesiana


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

quntmphscs said:


> Still reading this thread and I can't wait to find out what you've decided to do with your research!


We (my wife and I) have our own site up now and have drafts at : http://mistymanor.astahost.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=40



> I have a question though and was going to start a new thread and then I casually saw this tread and thought this may be more appropriate.
> 
> in 1986 I was told I had Liver failure (I've since been told that what I was told wasn't possible given all the "facts" - so who knows)..... zoom forward 6 months later working at health food store. A native American man came in and saw me surround by books (not real busy at the health food store) and obviously doing research on herbs. I was looking for a liver tonic or cleanser or just anythign to help keep my liver safe. He asked me why I was reading so many books. I told him. He told me to go find the bark of the Huisache tree, boil it and drink the tea. It took me a while to find the spelling because I thought it was wesatch. He told me the location of one but it was behind a barbed wire high fence and I never did it. It's come to my mind lately and I looked online tonight and found nothing about that. I did find something about using the flowers for colds though. I also found that the tree is also called a Sweet Acacia.
> 
> Anyone know about this?


I can not find it by either name in about a dozen books I have handy, including several on Native American herbs. You've got me.


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## mihal (Feb 11, 2006)

quntmphscs said:


> edit: changed my search request on google and found this. but too tired to look up the words I don't know. I'll read more tomorrow
> http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Acacia+farnesiana


Ok, "Mimosa farnesiana" I know, or, at least, I have seen. I had one outside my door in Raleigh, NC. The Mimosas on our land in Missouri have pink flowers. I have never read of any medicinal use, bute if you search by "Mimosa farnesiana", you will get a number of hits.


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