Unstuffed: Verbena hastata

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Verbena hastata

Sometimes, spotting a plant is easy, as was the case with this one. The blueish-purple flowers stood out against the straw coloured grass, a gorgeous brushstroke on the canvas of summer. It caught my eye, from my bike, about 100 feet away.

I instantly dismissed my first thought that it might be purple loosestrife. Purple loosestrife almost always grows in large stands, the flowers are much fuller on the stem and are a pink-purple in colour. That's when my heart started to beat a little faster. Could it be...? I had to take a closer look to be sure.

Slender, growing erect, 2-3+ feet: check.

Flowers arranged on numerous, spiked panicles: check.

Small, 5 petaled, blueish-purple, flowers in bloom from mid to late-summer: check.

Four angled stems with opposite, lanceolate leaves with coarsely serrate margins: check.

Oh yes! This is blue vervain, Verbena hastata, also known as Simpler's Joy, Herb of Grace and Swamp Verbena. It likes well-drained, but moist soil and can be found around wetlands and meadows near floodplains. It will also grow in open, sunny fields and along roadside ditches, fence rows and pastures.

It's a perennial plant, native to North America. The flowers provide pollen and nectar for many bees, wasps, and butterflies. Sparrows, cardinals and juncos will eat the seeds in winter. The seeds can be roasted and ground into a flour for human consumption too.

It was an important food and medicine plant to Native Americans and is still used in herbal medicine today as a nervine and anti-spasmodic. Large doses are emetic and it was used in this capacity to induce sweating to treat fevers, and vomiting for stomach issues. Modern herbal medicine rarely resorts to such harsh extremes these days, and the plant is more often used as a gentle relaxant and sleep aid, and a liver cleanser. It also helps to stimulate and increase milk production for new mothers.

I am so happy to have spotted this lovely plant and I look forward to getting to know it better and observing it through the seasons!

3 comments:

daltxguy said...: Nice find and interesting history and info about this plant. Edible, huh?
I'll be on the lookout for it, in case I spot it here at the farm I am staying at outside of Ottawa. There are lots of blue flowers about but I haven't explored them all.; July 19, 2011 at 11:13 PM
Amber said...: Hi there! Yeah, have a look for it. It's a very pretty plant.

I plan to collect the seeds from this one and try to establish it in my garden. I have no idea how finicky the process is to turn the seeds into flower, but if I can get enough of it to grow, I plan to find out!; July 20, 2011 at 11:06 AM
Amber said...: Oops! 'Flower' should be 'flour'. Though sometimes turning seeds into flowers is tricky too! :); July 20, 2011 at 11:38 AM

Raison d'etre

In 2008 I didn't buy anything new for the whole year. Food and basic toiletries (but not toilet paper) were the obvious exceptions (twice I broke my own rule). Used items were allowed, but I tried really hard to reduce consumption as much as possible.

I finished my year successfully, and along the way learned a lot about how much the world consumes, the waste we produce, sustainability, voluntary simplicity, climate change, peak oil, resource depletion, the water crisis, the food crisis, voting with your dollar, voting with your fork....

Now, I've transformed into a slightly nutty, very passionate, gardening, preserving, DIYing, simple living, nature loving, weed eating, backyard medicine making, urban homesteader, and I still don't use toilet paper!

With the help of the Awesomedudeguy (ADG), I'm continuing my exploration of living lightly and frugally, while increasing my self-sufficiency and resiliency, staying debt free, and preparing for a climate changed, resource depleted world, in uncertain economic times.

My nothing new restriction is lifted, but I continue to be a gentle, local consumer as much as possible.

My hope is that some of the information and resources I post about here will be helpful to others. Thanks so much for stopping by !

Yours in unstuffing,
Amber

"Forgive me if I never visit. I am from the fields, you know, and while quite at home with dandelion, make a sorry figure for the drawing room" ~Emily Dickinson

"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature." ~Abraham Cowley

"The laws of nature are under no obligation to cater to our culture’s emotionally charged fantasies of perpetual progress and limitless growth." ~John Michael Greer

"Sometimes we think we are too small to make a difference in this big world. Our actions seem insignificant in comparison to global issues such as climate change and population growth. However, the reality is that action on an individual level is exactly how big changes are made. Without individual and family sustainability, there’s no community sustainability. And without community sustainability, there’s no global sustainability. In fact, earth-wide change is absolutely impossible without individual change.
It really does come down to you and me."
~From Living Sustainably: It's Your Choice

"The universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable. Is it the most timid and shabby of all lies? It seems to have the look of it. For ages and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them alive until the silent-assertion lie retires from business--the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop." ~Mark Twain

"It is not enough simply to abstain from theft...We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers. It is our duty, therefore, to borrow no more from the world than we absolutely need, and to make full and proper use of it. Taking more than we need, and wasting it, is a form of stealing from the rest of humankind."
~Commentary on Sutra 30 The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali