Herbal Medicine for Preppers: Sweet Leaf, Tamarisk and Cypress

[00:00:01] Hey y'all welcome to this week's show today we're going to talk about a couple of trees that are useful medicinally as we continue our series of the medicinal uses of trees and we're going to start with a short one and it's called sweet leaf it's simplacos s-y-m-p-l-o-c-o-s is the Latin name and there are four varieties that have been found useful in herbal medicine

[00:00:30] one is native to my region and it's simplocos tinctora plants for a future only states of this plant the bitter aromatic roots have been used as a tonic a decoction of this grape root has been used in the treatment of fevers I don't have any more information on that one sorry wish I did but I got a lot of information on the next and it is tamarisk now tamarisk is a pretty

[00:00:58] pretty common tree actually it's a tamarix is the Latin name so t-a-m-a-r-i-x 14 varieties have been documented use in herbal medicine and there are actually a lot in my region are really surprised me because honestly I haven't paid too much attention to this one seems to be naturalized I guess people either brought them in as ornamentals or

[00:01:29] maybe you know by accident you know a lot of the a lot of plants especially what you might call weeds were you know are not native to here and some were planted intentionally like dandelion and plantain and chicory and all that to be used as food and medicine will be well others of course come in accidentally the seeds get stuck to somebody's clothing or they come in and shipment I think

[00:01:58] probably the most obvious of those is in terms of trees is the princess tree one of my favorite trees absolutely beautiful the the pods the seed pods are like light and fluffy and before we had styrofoam like styrofoam peanuts and such for shipping that's what people would use to pack good so they didn't get damaged in shipping

[00:02:25] so when you go out and you see where there's railroad tracks or where there were railroad tracks which is far more common these days you'll see princess trees and you know they are actually very pretty that's one's considered an invasive species oddly enough even though it's obviously not doing anyone any harm so I have no idea if tamarisk was planted intentionally or not but we've got

[00:02:52] one for the canary islands actually canary island tamarisk is a fairly common chinese tamarisk french tamarisk and tamarisk parvifola that's small flower uh parva flora I should say it just means small flower and uh tamarix ramosisuma uh called salt cedar oddly enough because it's

[00:03:17] well you know I can kind of see how it got that name but it is really matter uh tamarisk was once really widely used in herbal medicine and it could be in the ancient world is very popular it continued well into the middle ages and um it's actually uh the same family includes mirica gale which was hugely popular before hops was introduced for uh bittering and preserving beer um it's slightly intoxicating and uh

[00:03:47] that's why it was uh discontinued uh but deus corides wrote of tamarisk he called it mirica as i said it's in the same family uh or muris uh similar to myrr as well he says a well-known tree grows in marshy areas uh they were getting it from greece from uh the gardens of egypt at the time so it's pretty old stuff

[00:04:11] he said it is uniquely astringent to the taste and used instead of galls in medicine for the mouth now galls you know are where a wasp will uh basically put a nest or what would you call it they implant their eggs in an oak tree and it forms oak galls and they're incredibly astringent that's what people used to use for tanning leather so this is similar to to that in terms of

[00:04:35] astringency so it was good for the eyes and the mouth um and for spitting of blood it is given in a drink to women trouble with colic those who have a flowing forth uh so we're basically talking excessive menstrual cramping and bleeding etc it's it essentially or a sickness of the head and also good for those bitten by harvest spiders um probably that astringency of the tissue bringing down the swelling uh you know

[00:05:05] uh harvest spiders have a necrotizing venom so uh much like the black widow spider or the brown recluse or the what the wolf spider here in uh in america so maybe it just kind of helped localize that that venom i'm not sure uh decoction of the leaves take us a drink with wine uh he said was good for the spleen and gargled in the mouth helps a toothache for hip baths it is good for women troubled with discharge

[00:05:34] of fluids again we're talking well this could actually be like leucorrhea and and such as that and heated uh and as a heated rub it is good for those with lice and nits so it probably has some vermifuge properties uh an ash from the wood applies stops the flow from the uterus there are those who make cups from the wood and they use those for people troubled with their spleen an inflammation of the

[00:06:00] spleen uh they said that a drink given from cups carved out of tamarisk wood would do them good that's actually what he said it should do them good um i don't know uh probably some anti-inflammatory properties certainly bitter he said it was tonic uh it's interesting uh you know we don't use wooden cups a lot anymore as a wood carver in fact i just like five minutes ago finished carving a birch spoon

[00:06:28] from some beautiful spalted birch i got blisters all over my hands it's hard work so these days we just usually buy cups but people used to have to carve their cups um interestingly okay this is just an aside uh maybe some wood turners out there you you probably tried to turn a cup before you know that uh the a turn cup cut with the grain uh is uh prone to splitting you know it will swell up and it will

[00:06:56] split because of the the grain pattern a hand carved cup is usually carved against the grain and it doesn't split as easily uh could be an issue if you put very hot beverages into it uh but for the most part that's what our ancestors used they would often carry their own cup the cup would double as a bowl for soups and broths of course and a wooden spoon and that was what they ate with forks didn't come along

[00:07:22] oh gosh forks uh really didn't become popular until about the 1800s in most places people had a metal knife if you know what's metal became common and they had a wooden spoon and a wooden cup and when you went to somebody's house that's what you took with you because they would have only made enough cups and spoons for their family if you were going to get married the first thing you did was carve a spoon for your betrothed and that was a sign that said you know i'm ready to settle down and

[00:07:50] get married and we're going to have a family here's one spoon for you and you know i'm going to carve another one for our first kit uh it's it's a beautiful tradition uh i really like it uh if you want to look into that the welsh especially made very ornate uh marriage spoons and such the uh the the norse the swedes and the scandinavians uh they were also very big in carving cups and spoons

[00:08:17] and uh but everybody that's what they use you know um really uh metal cutlery and you know china glass that stuff really wasn't all that common until uh the past two three hundred years um they called it uh whiteware you if you had a you would go into town there'd be a blacksmith and he'd make stuff out of metal and there'd be a uh um i don't know what the guy was called at one point i think a

[00:08:47] bodger but a bodger was specifically a chair maker um but they would make whiteware is what they called it and it just meant uh utensils plates uh chargers bowls cups forks and spoons made out of wood and it is a beautiful tradition i enjoy it quite a bit if you want to see some of my work just go to judson carroll woodcraft uh it's a substack so it's just carrollwoodcraft.substack.com or something

[00:09:15] like that but you know google will take you there there's also a link in the show notes uh i don't have much of anything for sale on the site right now because christmas just passed and i had so many orders i literally uh could not fill all my christmas orders and a lot of people said hey don't worry about it um this is something i'm just getting for myself so push mine back and i'll take it after new

[00:09:41] years and so i was finally able to complete all my orders actually just today i literally just delivered the last order a fellow ordered uh uh two sets of wild cherry what i call a picnic set it's a spoon a long handled teaspoon a pickle fork and a butter knife a beautiful wild cherry they turned out

[00:10:07] fantastically he had bought a set of wild holly from me about a year ago and he said could you make me a big barbecue fork and a big knife and see holly is uh hard it's very fine grained and it also is a little bit flexible so you can literally carve a knife out of american holly and use it just as you would a metal knife for most applications i mean yeah you could probably serrate it and cut steak

[00:10:36] with it i mean it's literally that hard it's wonderful stuff uh so i just delivered those to uh to him today so yeah i'm pretty exhausted actually i have been um well to do the holly i had to cut a tree you know and then cut it up and then start carving his pieces i already had the uh the cherry um cut into logs and uh i was able to carve that but uh yeah my hands are shot right now so uh you know i had plans

[00:11:06] of starting some mandolin videos uh actually last week and my hands are just a wreck so if you're looking for my mandolin videos that i promised to teach you how to learn to play mandolin uh i have been writing out the lessons i have not been able to do the videos yet if you saw my hands uh right now you'd probably be a little shocked my knuckles are all busted i've uh well i've got one small cut i

[00:11:31] actually didn't cut myself too badly this time but big bloody blisters just like everywhere uh it's a it's a good thing i enjoy it and i really do enjoy carving wood because to put yourself through that much uh exertion and um pain uh for something you don't enjoy would not be fun at all just something about it i like working with wood my grandfather was a carpenter his his father had a

[00:11:57] sawmill and built houses and he was a carpenter i think his father's father was i mean you know it goes back a long way for us and it just it just feels right for me to have a gouge or a knife in my hand i love it i really do so um you know uh maybe i'll carve some cups out of tamarisk that would be really nice i have a lot of white oak and tulip poplar down from the hurricane in my yard and a white pine

[00:12:23] um white pine not good for cups at all far too soft wood but uh many other things can be made from it um including baskets believe it or not you can make some beautiful baskets out of the the inner bark of the uh white pine you can do that with uh tulip poplar as well but um there is a lot of herbal uh lore and information about the medicinal uses of cups made from different woods and you think about it

[00:12:53] you know when we're working in herbal medicine we usually use the bark uh sometimes we may use pine needles we may use something like that um catkins from poplar and such but the wood itself actually does have medicinal properties there's actually been a lot written over uh hundreds of years if not much further of making certain walking sticks out of certain woods and it sounds like

[00:13:20] well that's crazy right i mean a walking stick a cane's a cane well not really i mean what if that wood has an anti-inflammatory property you know what if it has a property that increases circulation or you know uh heating or cooling i mean a lot of these medicinal uses as you use it and your hands are sweating and you're absorbing whatever chemical uh components i guess i would say

[00:13:45] are in that wood you could absorb them through the skin so uh there are actually woods you can use to make a hiking stick you know i you know what i ought to write a book about that but i don't know if i'll get the the chance i'm writing three at one time right now uh with about 10 more uh in the backlog to do um but i i uh as soon as i can get settled back in my house and get the repairs done maybe i can

[00:14:12] start carving some cups and bowls and uh maybe some some hiking sticks or canes that uh would actually have somewhat of a medicinal property um worth a shot anyway you know you know this is the way i come up with ideas people ask me how do you come up with ideas for all the things you do well a lot of times i'll just be sitting here doing a podcast i'm like hey you

[00:14:39] know that would be a good idea uh but anyway um gerard the english herbalist of the 1500s wrote of german tamarisk he said tamarisk hath a cleansing and cutting faculty with a manifest drying again it just means astringent it also somewhat is astringent or binding and by reason of these qualities it is

[00:15:04] very good for a hard spleen being this is an inflamed spleen so that astringent quality is helping to pull inflammation out of the spleen uh it's funny i i mean i had to take like anatomy classes in college and such as that and i could not find my spleen if someone asked me i have no idea even how to diagnose a hard spleen but um you know if you do uh maybe you want to look at a tamarisk uh but he said

[00:15:32] it should be boiled with vinegar or wine using either the root or leaves twigs or branches and uh he he said as galen right if galeth was another uh old greek come to think of it galen may have been roman but he was he was a great uh a doctor um a surgeon actually he was an uh basically an army surgeon

[00:15:55] he said moreover diascordi diascordi teacheth that the decoctia the leave made with wine dust waste or shrink the spleen that's not a bad thing and that the same is good against toothache if the mouth be washed there with that it bringeth down the menses if the patient sit there in and killeth the lights and knit the lice and knits if the parts be bathed there with the ashes of burnt tamarisk have a drying

[00:16:23] faculty and scouring with all are a literal binding scouring generally means washing um a little binding i guess he just again is talking about these stringent property usually when they say binding they're talking about you know stopping diarrhea but i don't think that would washing with it would help the flowers and downy seeds of the greatest greater tamarisk doth greatly bind

[00:16:51] as it cometh very near to the gall okay we talked about galls before and it has a roughness of taste that is evident in the gall so very bitter and the flowers have a great cleansing faculty which the gall hath not and the flowers we fitly use instead of gall as a medicine for the eyes and mouth it is good to staunch the blood and stay the women's lasks and women's whites it helpeth the

[00:17:18] yellow jaundice so it's apparently has an anti-inflammatory property on the on the liver as well and cure those that are bit by the venomous spider again he's talking the harvest spider so interesting the bark serves for the same purpose the leaves and wood of tamarisk have a great virtue against the hardness and stopping of the spleen especially the leaves boiled in water and decoction drunk or

[00:17:44] else infused in a small vessel of ale or beer beer and continually drunk and if it be drunk forth of a cup or dish made of the wood of timber or timber of tamarisk it is a great of greater efficacy that's hard to say it is of greater efficacy so he was saying if you had an issue especially with your spleen

[00:18:08] that drinking ale or beer from a cup made from tamarisk wood would be very helpful yeah i'm going to look into carving a few of those uh culpepper wrote the root leaves young branches of bark boiled in wine and drank stays the bleeding of him hemorrhoidical hemorrhoidical veins uh yeah presumably he's just

[00:18:34] talking hemorrhoids but when he says hemorrhoidical veins uh that means it would also help with uh varicose veins because essentially hemorrhoids and varicose veins are the same thing just in two part different parts of the body uh basically you know if you're on your feet all the time your blood pressure is essentially pushing that blood down into the veins of your feet and legs and eventually the the veins

[00:19:00] get boggy as it's called they stretch out they lose their elasticity and that's a varicose vein um with hemorrhoids it's the pressure put against those veins that causes the same thing so we generally treat hemorrhoids and varicose veins the exact same way and you're looking for again an astringent um he said it's good for the splitting of blood the two abounding of women's courses so it uh

[00:19:27] it helps with excessive menstrual bleeding the jaundice the colic and the biting of venomous serpents except the asp so thank god we don't have asps in the mountains of north carolina we actually don't have any venomous snakes whatsoever so when i go down the mountain about a thousand feet i run into rattlesnakes and copperheads and all that but where i live we actually have no venomous snakes so it's one

[00:19:51] thing i don't have to worry about do you have to worry about brown recluse spiders though and uh very similar in their uh what they call necrotizing or tissue destroying uh venom those those are nasty things it is very powerful against the hardness of the spleens and the toothache and pains in the ears the red and watering eyes the decoction with some honey put there too is good to stay gangrenes and

[00:20:18] fretting ulcers so that's interesting of course gangrene and infected ulcers of the skin are incredibly serious so it that astringency must also be well they said it had a cleansing property so we can probably assume it has an antiseptic property and hopefully um that's been looked into more recently than 1600s when he was writing this um and of course honey does have antibiotic properties so

[00:20:45] it could be the honey in that combination that's doing it uh said it was good to wash those that are subject to nits and lice uh the egyptians do with good success use the word wood to cure the french disease what is the french disease have a little trouble finding this one it's probably syphilis could be gonorrhea uh not sure but uh the english called all venereal diseases french diseases

[00:21:13] and if you know anything about the dislike of the french by the english you can probably figure out why it says uh can be used in place of lingam vitae uh also given to those who have leprosy scabs ulcers and the like it's ash its ashes doth quickly heal blisters raised by burnings or scaldings that's good to know it helps the drop see arising from the hardness of the spleen and therefore to drink out of cups made

[00:21:40] from the wood is good for splenetic persons people with inflamed spleens it's also helpful for melancholy and black jaundice that arise thereof i don't even know what that means the ancients believed that swine fed from a trough made of this wood would have no milk so apparently it's that astringent it could actually dry up milk interesting and he said that the bark is used for rickets and children so uh must

[00:22:06] have some vitamins in it and finally an irish urwell states the wood bark and leaves are good for all disorders of the spleen drinking a coction opens obstructions and it's good for cough and catara so also good for uh removing congestion from the lungs so very very useful tree and um yeah got us into

[00:22:30] some interesting topics i think i'll wrap it up there um yeah i might as well well you know what i'll give you one more it's short uh texodium uh only one texodium is stated in my ridge region and it's pond cypress uh but there's also bald cypress which has been introduced all i know about this is plants for

[00:22:52] future says the resin and the cones is used as an analgesic for wounds so uh not a real common plant where i live um more so down in the swamps uh where i grew up uh well i grew up half in the mountains and half half in the swamps about an hour from the coast and uh cypress was yeah fairly common um i had no idea the bald cypress was introduced uh that region is kind of known for its cypress

[00:23:20] but uh yeah pond cypress is is very common so uh much bigger entry on the next one uh i'll save it for next week it's going to be basswood or lime tillia uh wonderful wonderful tree so useful in herbal medicine so look forward to that one y'all have a great week and i'll talk to you next time the information this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or condition

[00:23:49] nothing i say or write has been evaluated or approved by the fda i'm not a doctor the u.s government does not recognize the practice of herbal medicine and there is no governing body regulating herbalists therefore i'm really just a guy who studies herbs i'm not offering any advice i won't even claim that anything i write or say is accurate or true i can tell you what herbs have been traditionally used for i can tell you my own experience and if i believe in herbs help me i cannot nor would i tell

[00:24:17] you to do the same if you use an herb anyone recommends you are treating yourself you take full responsibility for your health humans are individuals and no two are identical what works for me may not work for you you may have an allergy a sensitivity an underlying condition that no one else even shares and you don't even know about be careful with your health by continuing to listen my podcast or read my blog you agree to be responsible for yourself to your own research make your own

[00:24:45] choices and not to blame me for anything ever