Guest Author - Wynde Baroli
Herbs are used everyday both as part of our regular garden designs and in the larger context of their components as pharmaceuticals for modern medicine. The first, something every garden is familiar with and certainly if you have ever received one of those potted plant jobbies with the annoying stuff that becomes water logged if you do not remove it before watering your lovely potted forced tulip or hothouse grown hydrangea – let me reintroduce you to your common friend -Sphagnum moss. This gem in the gardeners’ trug of good things can absorb up to twenty times its own weight. As you may imagine it is great stuff for mixing into a soil used for potted plants. Traced back to its use in the Bronze ages it is used to staunch bleeding in soldiers and is a great help for injured backpackers or campers.
Another plant with a medicinal use although more sophisticated than using as a poultice to staunch bleeding in the wilds – rosy periwinkle or Catharanthus roseus a member of the dogbane family an highly poisonous was found to contain two alkaloids. These are vincristine and vinblastine, which have been effective in treating certain types of cancer cells when used in cancer therapy against sarcoma, Hodgkin’s, and certain cancers of the breast. Although you would not use it’s properties in this manner growing and adding this plant to a memorial garden or a garden planned to continue to keep plants that are useful is a perfect reason to add it to your herb garden as a border to brighten up what we typically think are shades of green plants.
Taxus baccata or the common yew is another hero in the fight against cancer and an excellent tree or hedge to add to your herb garden. Perhaps you need screening or privacy – this plant’s herbal properties are the critical compound paclitaxel, which are found in small amounts in the bark. Unfortunately, only a tiny amount could be extracted in a very old tree until the discovery that a precursor to paclitaxel was found in large amounts in the leaves of the common yew. Keeping these shrubs growing in your own garden assures that they will be available in the future for more discoveries as they were almost wiped out during an over-logging in the 1980’s. Often, if it were not for home gardeners and seed collectors many plants we use in modern medicine that save lives every day would have been lost – so keep adding and seeking out the unusual.
Finally, a famous perennial with an herbal medicinal use. Foxglove or Digitalis. I do not believe any garden is complete without this middle border perennial nor is any herb garden complete without its beautiful nodding purple, yellow, apricot, or pink heads. The bees love to gather pollen on its hairy freckled throat and this plant adds such a nice mass of color in a perennial herb border. The Digitalis purpurea and Digitalis ianata save millions of heart disease suffers by strengthening heart muscle activity and regulating heartbeats that are too fast. What makes this one of my favorite plants is that it continues to humble scientists as this plants active ingredient cannot be synthesized in a laboratory. We must rely on actually propagating and growing this plant that ancient herbalist have used for ages – giving credence to how valuable the herbal knowledge of trained herbalist actually is instead of being pooh-poohed as mumbo jumbo
