Do you ever feel overwhelmed or confused by the long lists all over the internet of things that plants are “good for?” If so, you’re not alone. How can one plant possibly ease headaches, coughs, skin irritation, nausea, diarrhea, anxiety, menstrual cramps, and 10 other unrelated things all at once? And why did that herb that was listed as anti-headache actually make my headache worse?
In this post, you are going to learn about the 5 keys to understanding and using a plant holistically and shift out of the mindset of thinking what plants are “good for” or what symptoms they can treat. The 5 keys will provide a clear framework for understanding the underlying patterns of how plants work in the human body and different ways to prepare a plant to be ingested.
Before we dive in, let’s define holistic as the belief that the parts of something, in this case a plant, are interconnected and can be understood only by reference to the whole. This is in opposition to studying a plant by isolating its different parts and constituents. Keep that definition in the forefront of your mind as we explore the 5 keys of taste, herbal actions, organ affinities, energetics, and preparations.
Key #1- Taste
Taste is where it all starts! Plants communicate with the human organism in a multitude of ways including our 5 senses, especially taste. The mouth contains loads of sense receptors and is an important way we sample our outside environment and communicate to the rest of our body what is coming and how to best respond.
What we put on our tongue changes our physiology before we even swallow, activating the vagus nerve which sends a cascade of chemical signals from our brain to our gut. Simply knowing the taste of a plant can provide a wealth of information about how the plant will work in the body. I will briefly cover the 5 main tastes of plants, keeping in mind that most plants embody multiple tastes.
- Sweet- The sweet taste is indicative of plants that strengthen and nourish the constitution and build up the cells, tissues, and organs of the body. Sweet plants work on the anabolic side of metabolism by building molecules and proteins from smaller units. Fennel, Milky Oats, Licorice, and Cinnamon are all examples of plants that have a sweet taste.
- Salty- The salty taste indicates a high presence of minerals in a plant and is often where food and herbalism overlap. Think earthy, green, and nutritive like seaweeds and wild spring edibles such as nettles, violets, dandelion leaves, chickweed, and alfalfa. Salty plants often strengthen the framework of the body including connective tissue, bones, teeth, nails, and hair through their mineral content.
- Sour- This is personally my favorite taste and usually consists of plants that contain fruit acids that reduce oxidative stress through anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds known as bioflavonoids. Some examples are Hawthorne, Gingko leaves, Blueberries and Schisandra berries. Fermented foods and vinegars such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and apple cider vinegar also fall into the sour category and can support digestion by increasing healthy gut bacteria and promoting digestive secretions.
- Bitter- This is quite an intense taste for many people but also an important and highly complex taste that is mostly missing from the modern western diet. Bitter alerts the body to stimulate digestive secretions such as pancreatic enzymes and bile from the liver and gall bladder. It essentially wakes up the digestion to receive food and assists the body in detoxification by opening up the organs of elimination such as the liver and skin and draining excess fluid from the body. Some examples of bitter are Blue Vervain, Oregon Grape, Chamomile, Gentian, and Yellow Doc.
- Pungent- Our last taste essentially means hot and brings movement, dispersal, and stimulates fluids in the body like the blood or lymph. The pungent flavor can also promote sweating and thin mucous in the respiratory tract. Many pungent herbs possess an antibacterial quality such as cayenne, ginger, garlic, and horseradish.
Key #2- Herbal Actions
Herbal actions are a category of words that describe how an herb affects the physiology of the body including organ systems, organs, tissues, or cells. There are many actions used in herbalism, some vague and others more specific, some from old-time medical traditions and others coined more recently in our modern era, for a total of 20 give or take.
If you search around on the internet, you are bound to find lists of actions that number well beyond that. I consider most of these to be secondary actions which are words that start with anti and then list a symptom such as anti-anxiety, anti-tumor, anti-headache, anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory and on and on. These actions are much less specific in the information they convey than our primary actions.
Here is a list of herbal actions we use in western herbalism with a very, very brief definition.
- Adaptogen- balances the body’s physical stress response
- Aquaretic- increases urine flow
- Alterative- opens the channels (organs) of elimination and facilitates detoxification
- Anodyne- pain relieving
- Astringent- tones and tightens tissue, also a mouthfeel
- Carminative- harmonizes GI muscle tone, increases blood flow to the area and reduces spasm
- Cholagogue- encourages bile flow
- Demulcent- moistening, soothing to mucous membranes
- Diaphoretic- reduces fever through sweating and changes in blood flow
- Diuretic- reduces the fluid volume of the body via urine
- Emmenagogue- brings on menses
- Expectorant-expels mucous and increases lung moisture
- Laxative- encourages stool movement
- Lymphatic- reduces expression of stuck lymph
- Nervines- a broad category of herbal actions for cognitive-emotional/ nervous system balance. There are subcategories of nervines including stimulant nervines, relaxant nerviness, hypnotic nervines (sleep inducing), and trophorestorative nervines
- Spasmolytic- reduces smooth muscle spasms and organizes proper muscle tone
- Trophorestroative- strengthens a tissue or organ
- Vulnerary- wound healing, heals tissue
Key #3- Organ Affinity
Affinities are pretty straightforward and refer to where the herb is physically going in the body and having an effect. Knowing this information can guide you to use an herb more effectively.
As a very general overview, we have 12 organ systems each made up of individual organs. Our organs are made up of tissues, and tissues are made up of cells. Plants work on all of these levels in various places throughout the body, including the physical, mental, emotional, and energetic bodies.
The main organ systems are the digestive, cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, urinary tract, female/male reproductive, hepatobiliary (liver), immune, lymphatic, musculoskeletal, integumentary (skin), and respiratory system.
Key #4- Energetics
Energetics might initially come across as some far-out concept, but read on and you’ll be sure to grasp it. Ancient healers and herbalists who worked closely with plants and people noticed over time that herbs’ effects on the human body could be understood using a system of qualities based on dichotomies.
Energetics seek to illustrate 3 main qualities of a plant’s influence and impact upon the human organism through temperature, moisture, and tone. Energetics happen in a location or function of the body and are experienced and felt either immediately upon taking an herb or spread out over a longer period of time.
As you continue reading, imagine various ecosystems of planet Earth that reflect the internal states of organs and tissues in the human body. For example, imagine how a dry cough or dry flaky skin could reflect a desert ecosystem in the body, while edema or swollen puffy joints might reflect something more of a swamp.
Our first quality is temperature which refers to the spectrum of cold to hot and where a plant lands on that range. Heat energizes and indicates activity, movement, dispersal, and an increase in the function of organs and tissues. Think summertime or boiling water with excited and quickly moving molecules. Cold on the other side is inactive, calm, sedating, and reduces excess function. Think of a still, quiet, and inactive northern winter forest.
Some herbs are cooling or neutral and others are warming or outright hot. Think of plants that embody the pungent taste like cayenne, ginger, and horseradish root as hot. Plants that are aromatic and contain volatile oils (also known as essential oils) like rosemary would fall more towards the warming side of the spectrum but aren’t necessarily hot. Cooling plants often embody a bitter or sour taste. Hawthorne is a classic example of a cooling sour plant that is high in antioxidants and heat-reducing flavonoids.
Can you think of any emotions that might exhibit qualities of heat or cold?
Next, we have the spectrum of moisture, with some plants landing on the drying side while other herbs bring a moistening action to the body. Moist or damp refers to the quality of wetness and the waters, fluids, and hydration of the body (including fats and oils) and its tissues and mucous membranes. Think of water ecosystems such as rainforests, rivers, creeks, swamps, and oceans.
Dry is, well, not wet and lacking moisture. It refers to the draining of fluids from the body. Think of a climate with little or no humidity, perhaps the dry and deserty Southwest of the United States. The dry quality can appear as cracked, brittle, hard, rigid, and wilted while dampness can appear as swollen, plump, and fluid.
All herbs fall somewhere on the moisture spectrum, with a large number of herbal remedies falling on the drying side. The aquaretic, astringent, diuretic, diaphoretic, and alterative herbal actions are often draining fluids from the body through peeing, sweating, or increased bowel movements. On the other side, the demulcent action is our primary moistening action to the body, often working through plants with high amounts of polysaccharides such as licorice, marshmallow, astragalus, and usnea.
The last energetic quality is tone, with plants generating a spectrum from laxity to tension in the body. Laxity can manifest as looseness, lack of energy, and fallen/prolapsed organs, whereas tension manifests as overly constricted, tense, hard, inflexible, and rigid.
Think of a guitar string that is loose and floppy versus a string wound too tight that feels like it might snap. Or maybe you can envision an eroded river bank that has water pooling or seeping out where it’s not supposed to versus a riverbank with a healthy riparian cover flowing its course.
These qualities of tone are reflected in the organs and tissues of the body, specifically the nervous system, musculoskeletal system, and connective tissue that hold all of our organs in place and stabilize our body. If connective tissue becomes overly lax, it can cause organs to fall out of place and fluids can stagnate in the body. On the opposite side of the spectrum, tension can lead to spasms, cramping, constriction in the blood vessels, and limited movement and flexibility. Our herbal remedies that fall under the carminative and spasmolytic actions can bring relaxation to overly tight areas of the body, while astringents and even trophorestoratives could be seen as increasing tone in overly lax areas.
- Preparations-
This is our final key to understanding a plant holistically and where it all comes together!
After learning the previous 4 keys, this is the part where you learn how to most effectively prepare a plant to ingest it. When you take an herb, you can learn for yourself what it tastes like, what it’s doing in your body, where it’s going, its energetics and so on. Nothing is as valuable as your personal experience of taking a plant and feeling firsthand its effects.
When we talk about preparations, the first thing to think about is what parts of a plant are used if we harvest it. Even if you’re getting herbs from a local shop or online, it is still good to know what part of a plant is used as medicine.
The different parts that can be used medicinally include roots, bark, leaves, flowers, seeds, berries, essential oils, fixed oils, gums, and resins. It is also important to know what season or time of year the plant part is best harvested. For example, nettle leaves are harvested in the early spring as baby shoots, whereas the seeds are collected in late summer and the roots in early fall, so different parts of a plant are harvested at different times of the year.
Ok, so you have a plant in front of you and you are ready to prepare it! Hooray! We are going to split it up into 2 main categories- internal preparations and external preparations. This post won’t go too deep into the specifics, but you will get a general overview of different methods of preparation.
Internal preparations refer to anything you put in your mouth and ingest into your body.
- Infusions are made with aerial parts of the plant like leaves and flowers while decoctions are often made with barks, roots, seeds, and berries. An infusion is essentially making a tea by boiling water and infusing your plant matter in the hot water with a covered lid before straining to drink. You can also make an infusion by using cold water. I find mason jars are the best vessel for infusion making.
- Decoctions use more heat to extract the medicinal components from the harder and woodier parts of plants such as barks and roots, as well as mushrooms. The plant matter should be cut into very small pieces and placed into a saucepan with water and brought to a boil. Once it reaches the boiling point, turn down the heat to let it simmer for approximately 20-30 minutes before straining to drink.
- You can also powder herbs using a blender, Vitamix, or mortar and pestle and take them as capsules or mix them into hot water to drink as tea.
- Another internal preparation method is a tincture which is a highly concentrated form of taking an herb. Tinctures are made by using a menstruum, often alcohol, to extract the active medicinal constituents of a plant. For those who prefer not to ingest alcohol or want to make a more kid-friendly tincture, vegetable glycerin is the way to go. To make a tincture using the folk method, put your finely chopped plant matter into an amber glass jar and cover it with alcohol. I let my tinctures sit for approximately 6 weeks and shake them daily before straining with cheesecloth or a tincture press. The dosage for a tincture is much smaller than that of an infusion or decoction.
External Preparations refer to topical remedies that are best used on the skin or for localized muscle aches and complaints.
- Infused oils are probably the most common way to make a topical remedy. Plants with high amounts of resins, volatile oils, or triterpenes are best extracted through carrier oils such as olive oil as they are not water-soluble. Put your plant matter in a mason jar and cover it with oil, making sure all of the plant is submerged to avoid the potential for mold growth. Let sit for 6 weeks before straining. You can either use the infused oil as is on the affected area of the skin, or you can make a salve using beeswax and essential oils to create a more dynamic topical medicine.
- A poultice is when you pick the leaves of a fresh plant, like plantain and chew them up into a pulp which can be applied to an open wound and even covered with a bandage. Poultices often help stop bleeding and draw out foreign materials or dirt and clean the wound through their antiseptic qualities.
- An herbal wash is making an infusion as mentioned above and instead of drinking it, you soak a washcloth in the prepared tea and wrap it around the afflicted body part to help soothe muscles or heal wounds, burns, and scrapes.
- I have rarely used a succcus but I thought it was worth mentioning here. It is a pressed juice of fresh plant material and can be applied topically to the affected area. It will go bad in a few days, so if you don’t use it all up you can preserve it in alcohol to add to its longevity.
And there you have the 5 keys to understanding a plant holistically!
Congrats on making it to the end of this post, and hopefully you can start to understand how the 5 keys lay the framework for understanding a plant on a much deeper level than thinking “what a plant is good for.”
If you learn the taste, actions, affinities, energetics, and preparations of each plant you come across, you will be sure to gain a deeper and more holistic understanding of the inner workings and complexities of plants and give justice to the magnificent ways in which they can support the body on its journey to restoring health.
Leave a comment about something new you learned in this post or any herb you are excited to learn about on a deeper level using the 5 keys 🙂
