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.

Doctor Seuss was definitely consulted when this plant was created.

From the fluffy, alien looking fruits, to the scraggly antler-like fuzzy branches, this plant is straight out of the Lorax.
 
Its also one of our more charismatic New England plants, and makes one of my favorite teas for hot weather.

The other graminoids, while not true grasses, are truly beautiful, and full of fascinating flowers and uses.

Of course, 'graminoids' would also be the perfect name for the main characters of a plant based alien movie "The Attack of the Graminoids"-someone should get on that.)

Bread! Beer! Sugar!

Without grasses, these rather delightfully corrupting substances wouldn’t even exist.

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.

Invasive. Exotic. Introduced.

These are dirty words in the lingo of many botanists and naturalists. The division that this creates in the botanical/herbal world is astonishing.

Parrots beak. Lousewort. Elephantella.

With common names like these, it’s hard not to be interested in this plant.

Cyme comes from the French word cime, meaning ‘top/summit’. This one is a bit more capitalist, as the flowers on cymes essentially bloom from the top down.

Spike, Solitary, and Head may all sound like biker gang nicknames. But in fact, these are some of the delightfully nerdy terms used to describe flowers.

Cabin fever. Climbing the walls. Winter Blues.

If you live in a northern climate like New England, you probably know the feeling. This is where Alteratives come in, the ultimate spring cleaners.

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.

Pancakes. Fall. Canada. 

None of these would be quite the same without maple trees. From delicious syrup, to habitat for a host of native critters, maple trees are just plain magical.

Alpinus: Pertaining to the Alps. When you see this one, don’t think Julie Andrews in a nun outfit. Some plants with this species name have never even heard of the Alps.

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.

Alien space pod. Harbinger of spring. Stinky. Miraculous.

All across the Eastern US, people are feeling the stirrings of spring.  Sun on our faces. Birds singing merrily. And the pungent skunk cabbage, giving us a sense of hope for the new season, and eliciting the common, “Is that a skunk?” argument.

Most folk’s idea of an herbalist falls into one of several categories. Witch. Snake oil salesman. Hippie grandmother. Mad scientist. Or some combination of these. And while some of these labels might apply (and indeed, are self applied by some folks), the truth is always more complex.

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