My earliest knowledge of field botany came directly from trying to identify plants in the wild. With no formal training in botany, and only relying on various field guides, even when I didn’t know the plant I was seeing, I gradually came to recognize members of various plant families. One of the families I learned to spot early on was the evening primrose family. Later, when I took a field botany course at the University of Utah, I learned the botanical language to describe the characteristics…
Often cursed as a weed, blessed thistle is valuable remedy for nursing mothers, balancing hormones, liver cleansing, and aiding digestion.
An herbal remedy for balancing male and female hormones, chaste tree (vitex) can help with PMS Types A & H, dysmenorrhea, perimenopause, breast pain, uterine fibroids, and other female problems. And it can also help reduce an overactive male sex drive and teenage acne.
A powerful remedy for balancing female hormones and preventing miscarriage, false unicorn is an important herb that is at risk of being overharvested.
Meadowsweet contains natural analgesic compounds and aspirin even gets its name from the old genus name for these plants, Spirea. But, while meadowsweet has been used for headaches and arthritic pain, like aspirin, it has some very different properties. Unlike aspirin meadowsweet is actually soothing to the stomach making it a good choice for pain in the stomach or the intestines.
Over the years, I have observed that nearly all chronically ill people are shallow breathers. This is sometimes due to a hiatal hernia, but it can also be a sign of high levels of chronic stress. Breathing is vital to healing because without proper oxygenation we can’t maintain or even rebuild good health. Breathing is also essential to lymphatic flow, which is part of our immune system and helps our cells detoxify. Low oxygen levels in the body contribute to depression, fatigue, pain, and increased…
A few years ago I was researching the endocannabinoid system and phytocannabinoids to better understand how cannabis (hemp and marijuana) works. That’s when I first learned about a resin from a South American tree called copaiba. The oil contains B- caryophyllene, a terpene that acts as a phytocannabinoid on CB2 receptors. The endocannabinoid system is an important part of how the nervous and immune systems communicate. Cells send messages via chemical messengers and the endocannabinoid system…