Summer Yellow

It’s been a minute, as they say. I tried blogging with another host, but wasn’t feeling it. So, I’m back.

Anybody out the~~~~~re…..?

No one would know it from the looks of this blog, but I’ve actually been a busy, busy worker bee, both with my 9 to 5 and also at home.

A lot has transpired since my last post, but I won’t bore whoever you are with that.

The latest intrigue in the yard has been yellow flowers. Specifically, Evening Primrose and St. John’s-wort.

Once in a while I still laugh at how I was duped by the “prim” in evening primrose into believing that it would be a diminutive and fragile herb, only to have half my garden space strong armed by the behemoth. Sure, the flowers alone could possibly be classified as prim, but the plant as a whole is anything but.

This is the specimen in my yard. Photo taken sometime around July 4, 2011:


Here are freshly picked flowers:


And a jar of freshly dried flowers:


I had so many flowers from this one large plant and one medium-sized plant, that I also made a syrup and a tincture.

I could go into the history and uses, but why not use a few links? It’s mostly info I read somewhere else anyway:

http://www.pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Oenothera%20biennis

http://www.herbs2000.com/herbs/herbs_evening_primrose.htm

I’ve tried a tea from fresh flowers and dried. The dried version more suits my palate. Fresh, you get a lot of mucilage and a, …how can I put this? …A mild morally sordid smell…? Whatever smell one would associate with morally sordid is up to each individual. Nevertheless, I’ll leave it at that. ☺ When I drank a tea sweetened with the primrose syrup, I had no particular health issues, so the mucilage in the tea made my throat mucousy. I can imagine how that effect might be soothing to someone with a dry cough.

It is a beautiful plant. I only purposely planted it once. Since then, owing to its tendency to self seed profusely, it comes up wherever it wants, which just so happens to be a notably different location each year. Since it blooms in the evening, it’s one of the plants that hummingbirds go to for a last call before turning in for the night.

St. John’s-wort, the natural mood enhancer, wound healer, muscle relaxer, viral combater, sleep inducer and so on and so forth, is another yellow flowered beaut. A lot of interesting history associated with this plant, plenty of which precedes its connection with Christianity’s St. John the Baptist.

A good read:

http://www.sacredearth.com/ethnobotany/plantprofiles/stjohn.php



These flowers were just recently harvested from plants I started from seed back in 2003. I have made massage oils and tinctures from its flowering tops. This time, I decided to go back to simple tea and dried a nice sized batch.


And check out the crop’s first tea. Its gorgeous rosé hue is all in the glands. The tiny oil glands which cover the yellow flower petals and green leaves and which exudes a red oil whose main constituent is hypericin. It is this hypericin which is one of the components responsible for the many benefits that we reap from St. John’s-wort. Its bountiful tannins also play an essential role in this plant’s ancient and modern popularity in herbalism.