Being in Dillon, Colorado means the notebooks now double as field guides for various plants and trees we observe. One of the local plants we keep stumbling over is yarrow.
Also known as Soldier's Woundwort, yarrow grows along hillsides all over North America. This aromatic wild edible herb grows as a single, stout stem that produces tiny ray and disk flowers. A perennial plant, yarrow boasts handsome flower craniums that look like individual bouquets.
The Latin name for Yarrow, Achillia millefolium, is supposedly named after Achilles.
Yarrow has fern-like leaves which are generally 5 to 20 cm long, feathery and grow somewhat evenly in a spiral design along the stem.
Although the leaves are bitter, they can be eaten raw or cooked; young leaves mixed in with a salad are recommended. Yarrow leaves are also used as a hop-substitute for flavouring and as a preservative for beer.
Ryan Drum reports on a sad turn of events in the history of yarrow:
The oldest alleged use of Yarrow is as a funerary herb in a Neanderthal Stone Age burial in Shanidar Cave in Iraq. A swatch of Yarrow lay beside a human skeleton dated to over 100,000 BP. The plant material (including three other herbs) was stored in the Archeaology Museum in Baghdad and apparently destroyed during American bombing during the first Gulf War in early 1991.
Tiny green spider visiting a plant near Lake Dillon.
Drum describes the historic uses of yarrow during war and battle. In the past, yarrow was used to pack wounds as a functional antiseptic and means of stopping bleeding. It was much preferred to the other materials used to pack deep open wounds resulting from idiotic serious combat, clay, moss (sphagnum moss was still used to make antiseptic dressings for WWI, harvested in large quantities, traincar loads, from the bogs around Southbend, WA), spider webs, and horse manure (a favorite of the Napoleonic wars during winter and in Russia during the Russian evolution).
Yarrow is also an analgesic and antiseptic, so that it stops bleeding, lessens pain, prevents infections, and is often abundant in the open meadows favored particularly by the ancient armies in the Mediterranean wars.
The Eldest reports that yarrow is being used by landscapers these days as a border flower. You can learn how to harvest yarrow or make a yarrow tincture from Ryan Drum's website, which includes an interesting case study of how yarrow has been used to treat influenza virus.
