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Backyard Remedies
Growing Your Own Medicinal Garden
By Verna Gates
For centuries, medicine grew among us in gardens and in the wilderness. Practitioners of healing gathered and prepared the plants that soothed and often cured ailments from scratched fingers to depression.
Today, you can grow a beautiful garden, filled with colorful flowers that also serve as first aid remedies. Try some of these plants in your garden and take advantage of their additional benefits.
Yarrow
When the Greeks went to Troy, Achilles, warrior and famed healer, joined the battle. Virtually immune to arrows, he carried the injured into camp and healed their wounds with the plant bearing his name, Achillea millefolia, known today as yarrow.
Hundreds of years later, we find that Yarrow possesses active anti-bacterial components and works as a styptic pencil to stop bleeding. "Gather up the leaves and bind them to a wound," says Ila Hatter, interpretative naturalist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park and consultant on the A&E documentary, In the Shadow of Cold Mountain.
Today the roots, leaves and stems of the purple coneflower are useful in building immune systems.
