What’s Blooming (and Fruiting!) Now: Autumn
Our local medicinal plant series continues as we move into the fall, with fewer flowers and more fruits, and some particularly fragrant plants. The following medicinal herbs, or their close relatives, can be spotted around the city. I stumbled across all of the fruits on this list on a recent walk in the woods at the New York Botanical Gardens. It’s always such fun for me to greet medicinal plants in their living form, and connect with them as whole plants, before their fruits or flowers or leaves have been processed into the convenient powders or pill form that we most often stock and prescribe.
Patients regularly ask what the most effective way to take herbs is, when presented with the option of capsules, powders, tinctures or decoctions. My first answer is, whatever form you are going to remember to take two to three times a day! And for a lot of patients, if that’s as a capsule or pill, that’s great! Personally, if I can’t cook raw herbs, I love that granules and tinctures let me interact with the flavor of the herbs I’m consuming. Many of the plants on today’s list have distinctive smells and tastes that relate to their medicinally active constituents.
While some of these tastes may be a little, well, challenging at first, I think that the flavor is an important signal to the body. And often, the strong or unpleasant taste starts to be something the body recognizes as helpful. You might even start to crave an unusually bitter or sour herb once your body recognizes what it’s doing to help you. But, if you really can’t handle it, we can usually find a way to make the herbal experience more approachable.
Brighten Your Eyes
Chrysanthemum Flower/ Chrysanthemi morifolium Flos / Ju Hua
Chrysanthemums are impossible to miss this time of year. While it may be the same chrysanthemum morifolium species that is found in nearly every seasonal garden planter, and in your medicinal formula or tea, there are over 1000 varieties, only a few of which are considered medicinal. The medicinal chrysanthemums, which are usually white or yellow, are some of the latest flowering perennials in the garden.
Their bloom is well-timed for the seasonal increase of common colds and respiratory viruses, which they are often helpful at treating. They are used to disperse wind-heat, treating headache, fever, chills, dizziness or sore throat or eyes. The white flowers are considered sweeter, and are better for nourishing the Liver and clearing the eyes. A tea of these, especially with goji berry or mulberry, can be used daily as a treatment for chronic eye strain and irritation. The yellow flowers are more bitter, which increases its heat-clearing property. The wild chrysanthemum, or Chrysanthemum indicum is considered even more powerfully cooling, and is used to drain toxic heat conditions.
Take A Deep Breath
Ginkgo seed / Ginkgo biloba semen / Bai Guo
I have had female ginkgo trees directly outside of my last two apartments. From my window on an upper floor, it’s a beautiful tree to behold in the fall, as the leaves turn a cheery golden yellow. From the ground floor, however, the sensory experience can be repulsive, as the fleshy seed coats release a putrid smell once they begin to rot. The ginkgo genus has existed since the Middle Jurassic era with surprisingly little change from the tree’s current form. It’s theorized that the smell may have attracted dinosaurs (or other animals) to eat the fruit-like seed coat, and disperse the seeds, though it’s hard to imagine any creature now being attracted to the scent.
While the scent may warn you to keep your distance, the seed itself is actually quite tasty. It is used in Chinese and Japanese cooking and in herbal medicine. Its taste profile is sweet, bitter and astringent, without any hint of the foul flesh once properly cleaned and processed. Known as Bai Guo, the seed is used to treat deficiency disorders of the lung such as asthmatic wheezing and chronic phlegmy coughs. The astringent property makes it useful for certain patterns of vaginal discharge and urinary incontinence. You may see people around the city gathering the seeds, but be warned, the fleshy outside can cause skin blisters and rashes much like poison ivy.
For Your Aching Bones
Glory Bower Leaf/ Clerodendrum trichotomum folium / Chou Wu Tong:
I was introduced to this plant as a “peanut butter tree”. Most people know that peanuts don’t actually grow on trees- they are really legumes that grow underground. But although there is no relation between these plants, when the leaves of the clerodendrum are crushed, they smell remarkably like peanut butter! The Chinese name literally translates into “stinky parasol tree”. They put on a beautiful display of flowers in late summer and early fall, when many other flowering trees have finished their show.
Though the blossoms are now done, you may spot the bright blue fruit, set in a red calyx, throughout the fall. Medicinally, the leaf is used in formulas to dispel wind-dampness, alleviate damp rashes, and calm Liver yang. With the appropriate diagnosis, this can be used to address symptoms such as joint pain, numbness, widespread eczema, headaches and vertigo. Dosing on this herb is critical though as overdose of the fresh herb can cause diarrhea and vomiting. So even if you can sniff this tree out, make sure you see your Chinese medicine practitioner before trying it medicinally.
Make Your Heart Happy
Hawthorn Fruit/ Crataegus pinnatifida fructus / Shan Zha
Chinese hawthorn trees may not be as easy to find as the common hawthorn in the US. But both produce bright red haws, or fruits, that ripen around October, and can be used culinarily in jams and preserves, or medicinally. There is much research now in biomedicine into the use of hawthorn fruit for the treatment of hypertension, coronary artery disease and high cholesterol. It has been shown to dilate coronary arteries to lower blood pressure, and has a diuretic property that can help reduce fluids build up around the heart as happens in congestive heart failure.
In Chinese medicine, the sweet and sour fruit has long been used to reduce “food stagnation” and transform accumulations that can develop from excessive consumption of meat or greasy foods. This makes it helpful for digestive discomfort and pain after occasionally over indulging. But it can also be used to transform blood stasis and dissipate clumps, which connects with its effects on circulation and serum cholesterol, addressing issues that tend to arise from long term over indulgence. It is also useful for some postpartum pain conditions, and is contraindicated in pregnancy due to its blood invigorating property.
Protect Your Fluids
Cornelian Dogwood Fruit/ Cornus officinalis fructus / Shan Zhu Yu
Japanese cornelian dogwood, also known as Asiatic cornelian cherry, produces a small red oval fruit in the early fall, but may be more noticed for its showy fall foliage. This is the earliest flowering dogwood. It’s not as commonly spotted around the city as the Flowering dogwood or Kousa dogwood, which produces a larger, cherry size fruit with a distinctive spiky looking skin. These can be used culinarily, but aren’t the medicinal variety.
Medicinal dogwood fruit is considered sour and astringent, helping to stabilize the leakage of fluids from the body. It can be used in herbal formulas for urinary frequency or incontinence, spermatorrhea, excessive sweating, or excessive menstrual bleeding, when these symptoms stem from patterns of deficiency. The same symptoms can occur in cases of excess, and damp heat, for which this herb is inappropriate.
This distinction between symptoms coming from underlying excess or deficiency is an important reminder that Chinese herbal medicines are rarely prescribed symptomatically. Formulas are designed to address patterns based on differential diagnosis. Two patients with the same primary symptom could receive completely different herbal formulas, depending on the underlying balance of their systems. While certain herbs are also used nutritionally and can be safe to take on a regular basis for more symptom-specific issues (like the white chrysanthemum tea mentioned above), self-treatment is not usually recommended. Instead, let us help you find your herbal allies and build your tool box of herbs for your common complaints and underlying diagnoses (or better yet, work preventatively to avoid the recurrence of common symptoms!).
If you’ve enjoyed learning about these plants consider booking an herbal consultation to get herbs like these to improve your daily life. Check out the other instalments of this series here;
