All right, so we are with one of my favorite plants. It's called mullein. And if you just touch the leaves, they're so soft. And this plant is so magical because you can use all of the different parts. So you can use the leaves and you can dry them to make a tea. And it's been shown to help with any respiratory conditions relieving any kind of chest congestion. With mucus or coughs, this is really helpful. And then the flowers are the most potent part of the plant. So the flowers you pick off, and you can infuse in an oil that you can use for your skin for any mouth ulcers or any pain in your gums and you can also use it for– for earaches, which is the most common popular use for it. So whenever you're out in nature, and you're looking for toilet paper, always look to mullein. You will always spot it. It's usually always standing tall.
This guy is taller than me. And you can use the leaves, because they're so soft, you can use them as bandages as well and the flowers are very fragrant and some say that it actually smells a little bit like vanilla, but it does have a very interesting smell that you can't exactly pinpoint. So this plant that I have standing in front of me, this is two years old. Ones that are less than a year old, they don't produce these long stems that have flowers in them so once they start opening up the flowers, you can start picking them, but you need to have a lot of patience because every day more flowers will blossom so you won't be able to get all the flowers all at once so you do need a lot of time and patience and just be there with the plant and enjoy its company.
Okay, I'm gonna move to this one. Okay. Okay. Okay, I think I need to move on to the next plant because this mullein just needs more time to blossom. Okay, okay, so we have yarrow. The Latin name is Achillia millefolium and Achillia comes from a Greek, uh, warrior Achilles who was injured in war and he used the leaves of the common yarrow to actually heal his wounds and, um help him in his battle. And then millefolium comes from the word "a million leaves", and you can tell and identify yarrow by looking at its leaves. So I'm gonna pull some here, and so you can see. So yarrow has a feather-like appearance and so one leaf has a leaf and then it comes off with another leaf.
So that's why it's called a million, a million flower leaves, a millefolium. And so you will use the leaves, you will use the flowers. And you can do all kinds of things. So you can make a tea. You can also make a tincture. You can make a poultice, which is taking plant matter so taking the leaves or the flowers mashing it up into smaller pieces, and then applying it onto your wounds as a way to heal and speed up skin regeneration. So yarrow is a vulnerary herb.
Vulnerary means wound-healing, so you can use yarrow to help close up minor cuts or wounds and it also has astringent properties, which means that it tightens up the pores or tightens up the skin so that it will seal up open wounds. It can also show to help with menstrual cycles if you're prone to heavy bleeding. It can also help with bruises by also stimulating the lymphatic flow. And yarrow has a special compound in it called thujone. And thujone is found in wormwood or absinthe so some people say that eating this fresh can cause drowsiness or a drunken feeling and to combat that you can just expose it under hot water, or when you're diluting it in alcohol to make tinctures, that will get rid of the thujone.
Yarrow also has an anti-inflammatory compound in it. So it actually has salicin, which is a major compound in acetyl salicy– salicylic acid which is aspirin. So that can also help reduce fevers by drinking it as a tea or infusing it in a bath and having a nice herbal soak. So I'm just gonna harvest some of the leaves and the flowers. (laughter) It wanted to come out with me! This plant you definitely have seen many places, uh, this is plantain.
You often will see this by the roadside growing in the cement in your backyard, on a lawn, and most of the time people want to get rid of it. But did you know that this is one of the most medicinal herbs that you can find that's both accessible but also has many uses? It's flowering right now. And there's different species, so this one is the greater plantain. There's also narrowleaf plantain, which is Plantego lanciolata. But plantain is really good for skin also good for your mucosal tissues, so that's the the tissue that lines your digestive system, your urinary system all your tissues internally. A lot of people, who are going for a walk, they can just take a leaf and mash it up either using your own mouth and your saliva, or you can just crush it with your fingers and then you just place it on your insect bite, and just leave it on there, and over a few minutes, you will start to notice that it's less itchy less red, and that's because it is anti-inflammatory.
It's also a vulnerary herb. So with all vulneraries, it helps with skin– skin healing and skin regeneration. So a story about plantain is, growing up, and during recess time, I would always play with plants around me and I would always just mash these up, rip it up with my hands, and notice how tough it was. Plantain is very useful in repairing tissues and so people Including herbalists always use plantains to to help with leaky gut which just to show that it can help repair those tissues if there's already damage. So plantain is everywhere and that's just the Earth and the environment telling us how much we need it. Okay. Our next plant friend is Hypericum perforatum, which is Saint John's wort. What I like to nickname St.
John's wort is "sunshine herb" because it harnesses all of the sunshine energy and has been told to help with depression and low mood as well as anxious thoughts. So St. John's wort you normally would use the flowers, which are the most potent part of the plant and you can also use the leaves and to identify them you have to look for the five petals. And when you look at the leaf and you shine it up against the sun, you actually notice the little dots so the perforated, um, holes that you can tell by putting it up to the light, which is why it's called Hypericum perforatum, so perforated. And St. John's wort has Christianity roots.
Its name comes from Saint John's the Baptist and the properties of St. John's wort is that it is an analgesic, so it helps with pain, particularly any type of nerve pain. So recent research is diving into St. John's wort and possibly helping with um, with shingles as well as tooth pain from dental procedures. So the active constituents of St. John's wort is hypericin and hyperforin. Hypericin is the redness that comes off the flowers and the flower buds, so I can show you right now when you're harvesting St.
John's wort and you want to know whether it is at its peak performance is by squeezing the flower buds and seeing how much oil it releases. So for example I'm going to take this flower bud and I'm just going to squeeze it between my fingers so you can see that there's a lot of redness and a lot– it's also purplish in color. So, you know that there's a lot of active constituents within the flower at this point in the summertime and it will do this at a very narrow period, so it's actually best to harvest this right now. And if you miss that period, then you'll have to wait till next year. And so hypericin also has been shown to be, um to cause sensitivity in the skin for some fair-skinned individuals.
And hypericin is also what's been standardized in research and in supplements. However, other compounds make it also effective towards depression and anxiety. So I'm just harvesting the flowers that are open but also the flower buds which also contains a strong concentration of the medicinal properties. (Just gonna take this.) Okay.