For years I thought my bleeding was normal.

When aspirin, NSAIDS, and opiates can’t touch the pain - sometimes herbs can.

It was a colder than usual March day, and I was teaching a plant walk at the edge of a farm. We had just had 10 inches of snow, and whilst digging through a drift to get at some burdock, several students suddenly stepped back with a squelch and a chorus of “ewwwwws!!!”. They had found the storm broken branches of Siberian elm. The cracked bark, when meeting the melting snow, had begun to ooze mucilage onto their boots, leaving 8-inch strings of slime as they lifted their feet. At the time I remember thinking, Now that’s a moistening herb.

When used correctly, plant medicine can be super effective for those bumps in the road that seem to come with any proper adventure! Fortunately for us, there are a number of super common weeds here on the Front Range of Colorado and throughout the US that make up an ever present summer first aid kit.

The Perfect Summer Tea

If you pick your sumac fruits too early, you end up with slightly yellow water and the merest trace of flavor. Make sure your fruits are deepest red, and have a sour tang to them when you taste a drupe-it should be a pretty potent flavor.

Mints have a tendency towards stirring up the mucous membranes (that’s all those pink shiny places inside the body that we try not to think about).

So while they definitely affect the whole body, they have an especial affinity for a few specific areas.

Invasive. Exotic. Introduced.

These are dirty words in the lingo of many botanists and naturalists. The division that this creates in the botanical/herbal world is astonishing.

Parrots beak. Lousewort. Elephantella.

With common names like these, it’s hard not to be interested in this plant.

In the past few years working in herbal medicine, I have heard a number of opinions on herbs versus conventional medicine, particularly pharmaceutical drugs.

To better address the concerns and controversy of this subject, I’ve consolidated the more opposed viewpoints that I have heard over the years.

Like so many fragrant herbs, spicebush is a carminative. Carminative comes from the Latin carminare, meaning ‘makes you fart’. Okay, so not really. But it’s actual translation comes to something along the lines of ‘remove impurities’, so in essentials it comes to the same thing.

Pancakes. Fall. Canada. 

None of these would be quite the same without maple trees. From delicious syrup, to habitat for a host of native critters, maple trees are just plain magical.

A potent medicinal, this herb has all the right actions to shake things up for spring.

A prodigious weed, yellow dock has a tap root that ends only once it reaches the earth’s molten core (at least this is what I assume, because I can never seem to get the whole root out). 

Alien space pod. Harbinger of spring. Stinky. Miraculous.

All across the Eastern US, people are feeling the stirrings of spring.  Sun on our faces. Birds singing merrily. And the pungent skunk cabbage, giving us a sense of hope for the new season, and eliciting the common, “Is that a skunk?” argument.

Most folk’s idea of an herbalist falls into one of several categories. Witch. Snake oil salesman. Hippie grandmother. Mad scientist. Or some combination of these. And while some of these labels might apply (and indeed, are self applied by some folks), the truth is always more complex.

An infusion is made by pouring water over plant material then allowing it to steep. That’s it. When you make a cup of Red Zinger or English Breakfast, you are technically making an infusion.