Healing herb is flourishing on district heathlands

2:05pm Monday 30th July 2007

A WET start to the summer has resulted in many negative issues.

One of the more positive notes is that it has really allowed St John's Worts to flourish like never before out on the district's heathlands and drier wayside places.

St John's Wort is a beautiful 30 to 50cm tall plant crowed with 20 to 30 individual sunshine yellow flowers.

I suppose to the casual observer it has the same stature and colouration as the infamous ragwort.

I have even had to stop people who in the belief of doing good, had misidentified St John's Wort as ragwort and were labouring to uproot it all. Ragwort has yellow daisy-like flowers whist the St John's Wort has five distinctive petals to each flower.

St John's Wort has a long association with people and the history of this interaction to me, shows how the understanding and needs of our civilisation has changed through the years. The first records of this plant pre date Christian beliefs and St John's Wort (but by another name which as been lost through the passage of time) was employed in the summer solstice celebration, where wreaths of this plant were burn in a ceremony around crop fields, to protect them from evil spirits, until the harvest.

With the advent of Christianity, the plant, which flowers around the reputed birthday of St John the Baptist, was renamed St John's Wort.

At the time there existed a belief that if a plant physically resembled the physical location or attributes of an ailment, then this plant must have some physical qualities that would allow it to cure.

One of the most common species of St John's Wort has perforations within its leaves and it was felt that this would make it good for the treatment of perforations to the body.

Hence this, and as it fortunately shared the same affiliation to the St John, was the herb that the Knights of St John chose to take with them when they embarked on the Crusades.

The Knights of St John took their calling to treat the injured of this and other campaigns, perforations to the body being the biggest infliction, so the St John's Wort was in much demand. Fortunately, the perforations within the St John's Wort are not in fact holes in the leaves but capsules of oil.

This oil has been proved in modern times to have anti-bacterial properties that in times before antibiotics would have significantly helped with reducing infection in wounds.

In the later part of the 20th century the miracles of modern antibiotics had taken over from many traditional herbal remedies and the use of St John's Wort for the treatment of wounds fell by the wayside.

EDITOR'S CHOICE