Garden-Variety Treatments

Pay attention to your cat. It knows what does a body good.

When Sylvester frolics in the catnip, breaking off stems, he releases a volatile oil into the atmosphere that acts on his nervous system. Sylvester rolls onto his back and stretches lazily after he’s demolished your plant because he’s relaxed. Brew a cup of catnip tea, and you might do the same thing.

If you find yourself instinctively reaching for lavender bath oil for the tub at the end of a long, stressful day, or craving a cup of mint tea after a rich, heavy meal, congratulate yourself. You’re as smart as your cat. The oils in lavender contain sedative properties that calm tension and anxiety, and ingredients in mint promote digestion and relieve gastric distress.

So follow Sylvester around sometime. You may discover a whole green pharmacy of herbal resources you haven’t been utilizing right in your own back yard. Other gardeners have.

Frances Kennedy--a San Juan Capistrano landscape consultant and garden lecturer who specializes in herbs--drinks mint tea for the same reason most of us drink coffee.

“Spearmint tea makes me feel bright and alert,” she says. “It stimulates me without making me hyper.”

If you have to be on your toes for an event and aren’t feeling up to it mentally or physically, try a rosemary boost, suggests Nick Waddell of Riverside, herb grower and founder of the Inland Empire Herb Society.

“Rosemary is a wonderful energizer,” he says.

You can drop the rosemary leaves directly in the tub or--if twigs in your bath bother you--put them in a cheesecloth bag and tie it to the spigot, essentially making tea for the tub. Or you could buy an essential oil to add to the water or dab on your washcloth. Essential oils are available from health food stores or such specialists in herbal products as L’Herbier de Provence in South Coast Plaza.

“Rosemary is a great hair and scalp treatment, too,” adds Waddell. “Make a strong tea out of the leaves and use it as a rinse. Rosemary controls dandruff and leaves the hair clean and shiny. It’s particularly good for brunettes.”

Common culinary thyme contains antiseptic properties that make it a good cold fighter, according to Waddell: “It makes a great gargle for a sore throat.” Sage is also excellent for this purpose, he says.

Parsley is too beneficial to be used only as a disposable garnish, suggests Rita Corpin of Santa Ana, a member and former president of the Orange County Herb Society. “It’s very rich in Vitamins A and C and contains a lot of minerals hard to get in food sources. Parsley’s very healthy stuff. We should be making salad out of it instead of lettuce.”

Herbal literature also credits parsley with strong diuretic properties, making it useful for water retention, urinary infections and gout.

Fennel’s valuable, too, says Corpin. Some mothers in her neighborhood frequently ask her for cuttings, she says. “They make tea out of the seeds when their babies have colic.”

Adult stomachaches also benefit from fennel tea, says Luna Rose, a medicinal herb instructor at Taylor’s Herb Gardens in Vista. Rose also uses fennel in combination with wild cherry bark and licorice root in a homemade cough syrup.

“Use two cups of water and an equal amount of herbs and simmer until reduced by half,” she says. “Add honey to taste and continue heating until a syrupy consistency.

“Children like the taste, and I feel better about giving it to them than commercial cough syrups, which are full of artificial ingredients.”

Another plant everyone with children should have in their back yard is comfrey, says Rose. The presence of a chemical called allantoin in the leafs and roots stimulate cell regeneration which, she says, aid in the healing of bruises, scrapes, cuts and burns.

“It’s an incredible healer,” Rose says. “If you haven’t seen it yourself, it’s hard to believe how well it works.”

Bruised leaves of comfrey can be applied directly to the skin or layered between sheets of thin gauze first, she suggests. Or you can make a tea from the leaves, soak a clean cloth in the infusion, and apply the cloth to the wound.

Another wound-healer gardeners may be more familiar with is aloe vera.

“I keep a pot next to my kitchen door,” says Kennedy. “Whenever anyone burns themselves cooking, we slice off a piece and rub the slimy, green jelly inside the leaves over the burn. It takes away the pain, speeds healing, and prevents scarring.”

When her 5-year-old daughter, Holly, falls and scrapes her knee, Kennedy cuts off an entire leaf, spreads it open and tapes it to her daughter’s leg. “By the time the leaf falls off, her knee is practically healed.”

Leaves aren’t the only part of plants that contain medicinal ingredients. Many common garden flowers have beneficial properties.

Take chamomile, for example, a dainty white daisy-like flower that Corona del Mar gardener Sheryl Brewer grows, harvests and uses regularly.

“I make a tea out of chamomile and catnip when I have an upset stomach,” she says. “I combine it with powdered or grated ginger when I have nausea--they’re both good for that. Or I might have chamomile tea before bed when I think I’m going to have trouble sleeping, sometimes along with a valerian capsule, another natural sedative. And I use the tea for a rinse after shampooing. It brightens blond hair.”

Chamomile makes a delicate-tasting, sweet-smelling tea mild enough for and agreeable to children, says Rose at Taylor’s. It can be used for upset stomachs, hyperactivity and colic, she says. “If the baby is still nursing, add the tea to its bath water. It will be absorbed through the skin.”

Calendula, also called pot marigold, is another flower Brewer harvests from her garden and employs regularly.

“Calendula looks pretty in the garden,” Brewer says. “It makes a long-lasting cut flower in the house, and when the petals finally do wither, you can cut them off, let them dry, and save them in a glass jar to add to your bath (for their skin softening properties) or to combine with chamomile and comfrey in a poultice for treating wounds. Now that’s what I call a useful plant.”

Lavender works on the nervous system as a mild sedative. Its flowers can be used in bath water like rosemary leaves. Or they can be brewed up into a tea. Lavender tea is credited with relieving tension headaches. Rubbing lavender oil on the temples and back of the neck also works, says Rose.

Purple coneflower ( Echinacea purpurea ), a current horticultural darling locally, is also of interest to the scientific community, particularly in Germany. There are 280 echinacea products registered as medicinal herbs on the German market, according to a survey done by the University of Munich.

Ingredients in coneflower’s roots are believed to enhance the body’s immune system by stimulating the production of white blood cells, which fight infection.

Not surprisingly this U.S. prairie wildflower has attracted converts this side of the Atlantic, too. Brewer takes echinacea whenever she feels she’s coming down with a cold or flu. “And I rarely catch (them),” she says.

No matter how beneficial the ingredients in their roots may be, however, few gardeners are willing to pull up their carefully nurtured perennials. Brewer is no exception. She buys her echinacea in capsules from the health food store.

If you haven’t been to a health food store since your granola days, you’ll find the number of herbal products on the shelves have quadrupled.

“Alternative medicine is a booming business,” says Paul Holden, a clerk in the herbal products section at Mother’s Kitchen in Costa Mesa. “You’d never know there was a recession here.”

The federal Food and Drug Administration does not allow manufacturers of herbal tinctures and capsules to put information on their labels suggesting medicinal uses, says Holden. Technically these products are considered food supplements. Nor can store personnel give out information that could be construed as medical advice, he says.

“We can’t even display books that tell people how to use them within something like 500 feet of the products,” Holden says.

Customers who use herbal products for nutritional or medicinal purposes are self-informed, Holden says. “They teach us things.”

Self-responsibility and self-control seems to be the lure behind herbal remedies.

“The more you use these things, the more aware you become of your body and what it needs at any particular time,” says Brewer. “Besides, brewing up something from your cupboard is a lot more fun than buying something from a drug store.”

Learning About Herbs

Read a few books on medicinal herbs before you start experimenting, says Luna Rose, a medicinal herb instructor at Taylor’s Herb Gardens in Vista. These references are recommended:

* “Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs,” Rodale Press, 1987, hard-bound, $24.95. “You get historical, culinary and medicinal information all in one place,” says gardener Sheryl Brewer of Corona del Mar. “And it gives good instructions.”

* “The Way of Herbs” by Michael Tierra; “The Herb Book,” by John Lust; “The Natural Remedy Bible,” by John Lust and Michael Tierra. Any of the books by Tierra or Lust are “easy to read and very responsible,” Rose says. And inexpensive, since they’re paperbacks.

* “I also like ‘The Family Herbal’ (by Barbara & Peter Theiss, Healing Arts Press, 1989),” says Rose. “It addresses the problems you run into if you have children.”

Classes are another way to learn about herbs. Rose teaches classes on medicinal herbs at Taylor’s Herb Gardens in Vista. For a schedule, call (619) 727-3485. She will also be teaching “Herbs for Women” at Good Scents in Redlands on March 11. Call (714) 335-6160 for information.

Frances Kennedy, a landscape consultant and garden lecturer, teaches classes on herbs through the San Juan Capistrano Community Services Department regularly. For more information, call (714) 493-5911.