My first sip of this tea was a revelation.

In my childhood home of Connecticut, I learned about Russian Olive, and its close relative the Autumn Olive, as being an invasive species, not exactly evil, but definitely undesirable. These thorny, dense shrubs/trees would take over areas that had been disturbed, completely pushing out and keeping out native species of all kinds.

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.

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.

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). 

If infusion is the good cop of medicine making, decoction is the hard hitting bad cop. It’s used mostly for tougher plant materials, such as roots, seeds, barks, and hard berries.

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.