As spring unfolds and flowers blossom, weeds also grow in the yard, but not all of them are merely a nuisance. Some of these plants are actually healing treasures that harness the power of nature’s pharmacy.
The Epoch Times talked to Kami McBride, a herbalist for 35 years, who described some of the healing properties of these plants.
“People call them a weed, but they’re highly medicinal plants, and they grow; you don’t even have to plant them. And so my four favorite are chickweed, dandelion, plantain—not the banana plantain—and violet,” said Ms. McBride.
She said medicinal plants are really important, and she believes that every family and community needs to have somebody who’s engaged in learning how to implement herbal medicine and natural remedies so that we can become more empowered and not have to rely on pharmaceutical companies. She added that turning to herbs could help in case there are shortages of drugs too.
“I’m not against drugs, but we can save the drugs for the big stuff, and we use the herbal medicine for the everyday stuff—the cuts, the scrapes, bruises, headaches, stomach stuff, itchy skin stuff—the herbs are really useful for that,” she said.
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She said that if you can get on the track of turning to herbs first for everyday ailments, you can save yourself, because over-the-counter or prescription medications have side effects. She said that one of the main side effects that they all have is they disrupt your gut function, and they cause inflammation in the gut, which means over time you don’t digest your nutrients as well.
She said this can lead to affecting your immune system and your mental health.
“It begins in your digestive tract,” Ms. McBride said.
She said there are so many things that get disrupted when you think that you’re just going to take a little medication for your acne, or your headaches, or a little pain. Even those common over-the-counter medications can disrupt your system, and some of them have very serious and debilitating side effects that so many people don’t realize, she said.
“What we’re trying to do here is get empowered to take care of ourselves without that risk when we can,” she said.
Plant Identification
“When you’re harvesting, in your yard or wherever, in the wild, you really need to have 125 percent accurate assessment … because especially like dandelions, they have a lot of lookalikes; you need to do some due diligence,” Ms. McBride said.She said you can learn a lot about herbalism through reading and watching videos, but for plant ID she thinks you really need to have a live person working with you.
“You can get that from master gardeners. You can go to your local nursery; it’s amazing how many plant lovers and herb lovers there are, working at the local nursery, that are happy to talk to you; or the health food stores have fliers, or they have the connections of where you can go on an herb walk or where you can hire someone to come to you,” she said.
She added that you can look for a regional ID book and can usually find them at the library, but you want to find something for your region right where you live, so that it can really be narrowed down. She said to look for an herbalist, and there might be an herbal apothecary or an herb shop near you, or you can pay an herbalist to come identify these plants for you so you can have complete confidence.
For years, she has gone onto people’s land and identified all the herbs for them, she said.
She warned that harvesting next to golf courses is not a very good idea because they use a lot of pesticides, and plants alongside the road have absorbed all the toxicity from the traffic.
She said that you want to be aware of where you’re harvesting and what’s happening in the surrounding environment as far as toxicity goes.
Dandelion
Ms. McBride said that she could spend a couple hours talking about each plant, but this time she gave a brief overview of several of them, starting with dandelion (Taraxacum officinale). She said dandelion is incredibly nutritive and is full of beta carotene, iron, vitamin C, potassium, and calcium.
She said it’s an alterative, so it helps increase the flow of blood to the tissues and therefore helps the body increase absorption of nutrition, and it also helps with metabolism.
“Dandelion is one of our bitter herbs, and bitter herbs stimulate the digestive tract, so it really increases the flow of bile; it supports the liver and helps you to digest and absorb nutrients,” she said.
She said dandelion works with the liver and the gallbladder, and there is a contraindication, so you don’t take it if you have any kind of gallbladder, liver, or digestive disease or illness.
Plantain
Plantain (Plantago lanceolata), not to be confused with the banana-like plantain, is a powerful vulnerary plant, which helps to heal the skin, Ms. McBride said. She said vulnerary plants increase the rate at which your skin cells regenerate.
“So when you apply plantain to your skin, it helps reduce itching and inflammation. It’s one of the best herbs for bites, like bug bites, spider bites, mosquito bites; it helps to heal the skin quicker,” she said.
She mentioned that it’s one of the best herbs for bee stings, and you can chew it up and make a poultice that you can apply to a bee sting, and the pain literally goes away.
“I’ve taught all the children in my life to chew on plantain, put it on the bee sting, and they just go, ‘Oh my gosh, it hurt, now it doesn’t,’” said Ms. McBride.
Chickweed
Chickweed (Stellaria media) is also a vulnerary, which heals the skin and reduces inflammation, she said.She said it’s very emollient, which means it’s soothing and lubricating, reduces inflammation, reduces pain, and is good for skin ailments like boils, eczema, and psoriasis. She added that it’s another nutritive herb that is high in vitamin C, zinc, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and selenium.
“It’s one of the herbs that we use as a gargle to soothe anything that might be inflamed in the throat or in the mouth,” said Ms. McBride.
Violet
Violet (Viola odorata) is another very cooling, soothing herb. It’s also an emollient, a vulnerary, and a lymphagogue, said Ms. McBride.
She said lymphagogues help to move and drain the lymph, so violet is one of the spring herbs that is good to drink as a tea.
Winter can be more sedentary for some people, and the lymph may be a little more congested, so violet helps you to drain that, she said.
She said violet is also an amazing herb for reducing coughs, including a dry hacking cough; if you have a sore or scratchy throat you gargle with violet leaf. She said you can also take the flower petals and put them in your food.
“These wild weeds can be a gateway to realizing how much the herbs can help you, in a very simple way, but once the herbs work for you, once they help reduce the sore throat, or once they help alleviate the scratchy itchy skin, you go, ‘Okay, what else can I learn?’” she said.
Add Herbs to Your Meals
“The best way to take them is to get them into your food; that way, you don’t have to worry about dosage at all,” said Ms. McBride.She said you can make pesto out of them, or you can chop them up, and when making a salad or soup or smoothie, just throw in a cup of these wild greens.
Her favorite way to get nutrition from wild weeds is by making pesto.
“So I make up a batch of wild weed pesto every week in the spring, where you just have three cups of the weeds, half a cup of olive oil, some garlic, lemon. You can throw in a half a cup of any kind of nut; you know, it can be pine nuts, but it can also be pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, and then if you want to, throw in some parmesan cheese, and blend it up.”
She added that you can use the pesto instead of mayonnaise, and it can be the base to a salad dressing; you can mix it in with rice or eggs, and now your meal is more medicinal and more nutritious.
“My book ‘The Herbal Kitchen’ has a lot of really good recipes so that you can start with a tea or you can start with a pesto … or you can make a vinegar out of the nutritious weeds because the vinegar absorbs a lot of the vitamins and minerals,” said Ms. McBride.
She said the beautiful thing about these weeds is that they really are very nutritious and very healthy as far as increasing your diversity of nutrition. They provide a concentration of minerals that isn’t in the big grown vegetables.
“Most of these herbs, they’re not like taking two pills three times a day. They’re fresh, wild weeds that come and go,” she said. “So you think of just doing them a little bit at a time, and not just ongoing forever; you don’t do any herbs that way.”
Start Small
She said to just start with one thing, don’t get overwhelmed, and have fun. These plants are all around us, and it’s a great way to learn about herbal medicine and learn how to bring the plants into your everyday life in a way that brings healing to you, your family, and the people you love and live with, she said.She mentioned that if you’re on medication, or you have a big health challenge, it’s always a good idea to talk to a health care practitioner.
Dandelion can be mixed with some medications, but if you really need a certain dose of a medication, it can alter that, she said.
She said learning about these herbs is a great entryway for children, to teach them to take care of themselves so they don’t have to go to the store and rely on something in a box that could possibly harm them. She added that giving them the capacity to do something to take care of themselves, creates a mindset that’s independent and more and more empowered to work with the earth, to work with nature, in a good way to take care of ourselves. She said that is what most humans on the planet still do and what we have always done.
Many people, but not all, have had this kind of cultural disruption; generations of herbal knowledge was just gone, thrown to the wind, she said.
So Ms. McBride said her life has been one of reclaiming the craft of herbal knowledge, and for her it is an important part of being human and being healthy.
She added that it’s been hard work, but it’s so much easier if you’re introduced to it as a child, because then it’s in your bones and you don’t question it, and it becomes your reality.
“So the more we can bring this into the schools, bring this into our children’s lives, the better off we are all going to be and the healthier they’re going to be for the rest of their life,” she said.
At 19 years old, Ms. McBride had brain surgery to remove a tumor. When she came out of surgery, the surgeon asked her what medications she was taking, and after she told him, he said he had been doing surgery all week long on women who had taken that particular medication. He told her to stop taking it.
So she started wondering if there was a different way or if she could have done something different. Shortly after that, she heard about holistic health and had an insatiable desire to learn everything she possibly could.
“I was literally 19 years old,” she said. “I studied everything holistic health I could get my hands on; I traveled all over the country apprenticing. There was no internet. You had to actually go live with the herbalist.”
She said she went on to train and study with different people for a solid 10 years.
Now Ms. McBride has been teaching herbal medicine for 35 years. She has taught at six different colleges, including the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing. She taught at that school for several years in the complementary and alternative medicine department.
“I just love onboarding people into this world, starting from the very beginning,” she said.
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