The Healing Garden: Herbal Plants for Health and Wellness

Healing With Herbs: 3 Examples from The Healing Garden

Calendula

Healing qualities: This magnificent medicinal flower warms and uplifts the spirit, embodies the sun’s light-filled nature, restores vitality,and heals damp and hidden places in the body. A valuable falland wintertime remedy, calendula adds joy and color to tea blends.Calendula mildly stimulates the immune system and is beneficial for reducing colds, swollen glands, flu, and fever (when combined with wild bergamot and yarrow). The flower’s bitter flavor gently stimulates the actions of the liver and gallbladder, aiding the body in eliminating toxins. Calendula also supports lymphatic detoxification following an illness. A tea or diluted tincture soothes the mucosa (lining) of a person’s mouth if it is raw or inflamed, and heals gum tissue after a tooth extraction.

Echinacea

Healing qualities: Echinacea has remained an important medicinal plant for treating insect bites, poisonous snakebites, sore throats, abscesses, and septicemia. I reach for echinacea tincture at the onset of a viral or bacterial infection, especially when the throat is sore, the body has been exposed to wind, and/or a thick yellow-greenish sputum (a sign of heat) is being coughed up. Echinacea’s acrid nature thins phlegm and sputum so they can be more easily expectorated from the body. The plant’s bitter and cool nature clears the heat caused by the infection. Echinacea and burdock root, taken internally three to four times daily, is one of my favorite combinations for resolving boils, carbuncles, and lymphatic swellings.

Teasel

Healing qualities: I once observed a dove with a broken wing. Each morning, over several weeks, she emerged from a sheltered area and drank the water held within the leaves of the teasel plant. One day she flew away. She had healed! Later that summer, baby doves appeared in our garden. This experience led me to study teasel. Since that time, I have included teasel root tincture in herbal blends for broken bones or inflamed and injured muscles, joints, and tendons, and as part of a protocol for people living with Lyme disease. I also recommend a few drops of root tincture or flower essence for people whose spirit feels broken—who feel emotionally exhausted, depleted, discouraged, vulnerable, or otherwise at odds with the world. According to David Dalton’s Stars of the Meadow, “Teasel helps one find the way back to living in harmony with one’s soul.”