They’re such a pretty flower. Nothing in my garden has just one purpose – this little suburban garden is too small to fit nectar sources for pest predators, pollen sources for pollinators, flowers for cutting for the vase on the kitchen table, compost materials, food and medicinals for the chooks and quails, food and medicinals for us – everything has to do at least two or three of those. More if it’s finicky and hard to grow.
Echinacea is the opposite of finicky. It’s a hardy perennial that will cope with a wide range of climates. You can grow it easily from seed, or even more easily by begging a root division from a fellow gardener in autumn. It goes dormant in winter, but flowers all the way from late spring through to early winter, with these very pretty flowers that last for ages in a vase. The flowers are buzzing all day with native bees and butterflies and hoverflies.
And I can harvest flowers and roots for making a tincture.
Echinacea has a long history as a traditional remedy for coughs, colds and sore throat, and there’s decent evidence that it works, at least for shortening the duration and preventing repeat infections. It has anti-viral and anti-bacterial effects, but the main mechanism seems to be immune system stimulation. Humans have two kinds of immune reactions – innate and adaptive. Innate works by just launching an all-out assault on anything foreign – that’s the runny nose, temperature, swelling kind. Adaptive works by recognising the particular pathogen, storing the memory and launching a targetted attack against it. Echinacea seems to support both kinds. And it seems to particularly support responses to “enveloped viruses”. Where have you heard that term before? That’s why we were all washing our hands and using alcohol based sanitisers in the early days of the pandemic. Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses, both the common cold and its nastier cousin.
Echinacea purpurea, Family (Asteraceae (Aster family), Echinacea
I have my echinacea growing in a large pot and it seems quite happy there. It grows a metre or more tall and flowers quite prolifically through a long season. Over winter it goes dormant but takes off again in spring.
Mostly I just cut the flowers for the house and appreciate them in the garden (along with the nectar and pollen eaters). But if you want to have it on hand for a cold, you need to make it ahead of time, because fresh it doesn’t work so well. It works best as an alcohol extract and that takes a month or more to mature.
The easiest way to make a tincture is to put some fresh flowers and leaves in a blender with enough vodka or gin to cover them, let the blended mix sit for at least a month giving it a shake every so often, then strain through a fine cloth. You can add some well-washed roots too if you like. Keep the tincture in a dark place. Over the course of a cold, an adult will probably go through a 250 gram jar full, at the rate of half a teaspoon every few hours.
Most of the medicinal use research I found by following links from
- Evaluation of echinacea for the prevention and treatment of the common cold: a meta-analysis,
- Safety and Efficacy Profile of Echinacea purpurea to Prevent Common Cold Episodes: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial
- Echinacea_Reduces_the_Risk_of_Recurrent_Respiratory_Tract_Infections_and_Complications_A_Meta-Analysis_of_Randomized_Controlled_Trials and
- Echinacea as a Potential Force against Coronavirus Infections? A Mini-Review of Randomized Controlled Trials in Adults and Children
We talk about food security but not so much about medicine security. This is a series about the plants with a good evidence base for medicinal use. They all have garden ecosystem and culinary uses too, so worth growing anyhow, and having them in the growing close at hand might give you a small measure of security in the wild west of late capitalism. You will find the rest of this series by clicking the tag Medicinals.
I have 4 echinacea plants in my front garden/orchard. I bought them from Diggers as tiny little seedlings during one of Melbourne’s many lockdowns, and if I’d known how big they grew I’d have planted them further apart. But they… every year I now get a big “bunch” of flowers under the plum tree!