Put the kettle on to boil, stock your tea pot with some tulsi or lemonbalm tea, and get your notebook ready, because the Learning Garden Series is back. It’s time we talked about the Mint family. Botanically, they are known as Lamiaceae.
Say it with me: “lam-E-ay-see-ay”.
Guess which herbs are in this family?
You get a freebie: mint.
Now name the of the most iconic, fragrant, and revered culinary herbs you can think of:
Basil
Rosemary
Thyme
Sage
Oregano
Each of these plants have square stems. That includes the the wild medicinal ones - self-heal, motherwort, beebalm, hyssop, skullcap, the aforementioned tulsi and lemonbalm, and even creeping Charlie. Another key signature is in their leaf pattern, attached to the stem directly opposite each other. If you look closely at their small irregular flowers, you will see a flower sticking its tongue out at you in a pout of petals:
Mint family plants play a major ecological role as an early succession species. Whether through seed, rhizome, or both, mint can hold ground and multiply fast. This comes in handy when there is an ecological disturbance, such as a landslide, flood, or your own garden bed. That is usually the first thing gardeners learn about mint: never plant it in the ground, or else it will “take over”.
Medicinally, the most important thing to know about mints has to do with their volatile oils. That is, the source of the scent that gets released into the air when you harvest or brush past many of the Lamiaceae plants.
In his book BOTANY IN A DAY: An Herbal Field Guide to Plant Families of North America, Thomas J. Elpel writes of volatile oils:
“Medicinally, volatile oils are spicy, stimulating, and warming, causing the body to open up and sweat… opening up the blood vessels for ease of circulation. Some plants with volatile oils have mildly sedative and nerve-calming properties.”
He explains that volatile oils can possess carminative properties, or in other words, help expel gas. They can also help reduce intestinal and fungal parasites. Perhaps most importantly for those of us who are no stranger to grief, I consider it no coincidence that mints also offer cardiotonic actions. A broken heart, cognitive distress, and an upset stomach often go hand-in-hand during times of loss after all.
The medicinal properties of each plant varies, of course. Each herb, on its own, can have dozens of different medicinal actions. But if we took the mint family as a whole and zoomed out over thousands of years, we’d see a lineage that has been in the business of healing the hearts, minds, and guts of humanity for a long time.
Robin Rose Bennett, in her book THE GIFT OF HEALING HERBS, has a recipe to help with grief. It’s an infusion that includes: tulsi, hawthorne berries, skullcap, nettles, spearmint, and borage flower essence. Lamiaceae is represented in 3 of the 6 herbs included.
With everything going on in the world, and our individual challenges on top of it, many could benefit from the multi-functional medicine of the mints. However, while ~40% of all pharmaceuticals are derived from plants, herbs don’t work like standardized drugs. While some, like motherwort tincture, can get to work in seconds to calm an aching heart, usually they require more time, consistency, and integration into our lives to achieve best results. They require a relationship, one that involves learning the best ways to extract, infuse, and consume different herbs for different purposes.
These practices become ritual: boiling the water. Shaking the jars of tincture, oil, or vinegar to agitate the herbs and facilitate efficient extraction. Straining, pouring, labeling, and dosing comes next. In the case of basil, you macerate the leaves with garlic, olive oil, nuts, cheese, and salt for pesto. For gardeners an farmers, those rituals begin way before that, with the seed.
Through each of these steps, we are re-connecting with often lost traditions of our ancestors. I don’t mean the more recent ancestors who either built or were displaced and exploited by the industrial revolution, which facilitated the greatest transfer of people off of the land and into factories and cities in human history.
By ancestors, I’m referring the 300,000 years and thousands of generations of humans who lived within a diversity of ecological niches as hunters and gathers all over the world. Our current state of lack of access to traditional ways of land-living is relatively novel, and totally unprecedented for life on Earth. We are still those people, genetically and spiritually, whether we realize it or not. Each mouthful of food, each drink, each physical ailment is an opportunity to re-claim our relationship to Earth through the plants, and plant-fed animals, who we co-evolved with.
Science offers us even more insight into the fine and complex mechanisms of our bodies telling us something is missing. The study of the brain-gut connection was spurred by the discovery of the vagus nerve, which connects the nervous system with the enteric system, aka the nerves lining the gut. These nerves form a bidirectional communication network, meaning, they talk to each other. The gut influences the brain, and vice versa.
As someone who struggles with both my gut and brain at times, it resonates. Who among us hasn’t experienced a traumatic event so intense as to be physically nauseating? If not, lucky you! Instead, you might have felt your stomach drop before public speaking, or after getting dumped, or receiving some bad news. These are all examples of the brain-gut connection in action.
There are too many ways to use mint family plants for healing to cover them all, but one highly useful medicinal actithem offer are their antiseptic properties. As we move into cold and flu season, I am excited to share with you my #1 go-to method for kicking a head cold fast.
Drumroll please: herbal face steams.
I wish I could name a single source for this practice, but my first introduction to this was from my own mom when I was a kid. I’ve also read of this practice being used by Native Americans, ancient Greeks and Romans, and it’s described in Ayurvedic texts.
Here’s how to do it:
At the first sign of a runny nose, cough, or sore throat, boil a pot of about two quarts of plain water.
Gather supplies: a bath towel, a trivet, and a timer. Set these up at a table with a chair.
Once the water boils, turn off the heat and add a generous handful of: thyme, rosemary, sage, or oregano. Beebalm also works. All have antiseptic properties and are safe for the skin and respiratory system.
Bring the pot to the table and place it on the trivet. Set a timer for 10 minutes.
Hold your head over the pot and drape the towel over your head, creating a steam tent. You can crack the towel as needed, but you should try to have it as hot as you can stand it.
Breathe in through the nasal cavity slowly and deeply. Your sinuses may release a bunch of junk, or it may feel like the steam is tickling an itch deep in your nasal/throat area. Alternate between breathing in through your nose and your mouth, to expose both the sinuses and the throat to the germ-killing steam.
If you can’t last 10 minutes, that’s okay. Hold out for as long as you can.
Remove the towel. Optionally, this is a good time to use a face mask of clay, honey, oatmeal, or whatever you prefer to give you a healthy glow. Don’t forget to moisturize after.
Relief is often immediate, especially if you catch your symptoms early. Repeat 1-2 times a day until you’re back to normal.
If you want to pamper yourself even more, wait until the water cools off enough to comfortably soak your feet in it. I find this especially comforting if there are body aches and chills.
Toss out the water and the herbal material into the compost pile when cool.
As a mom of a young child, we have been through the brutal cycle of catching everything under the sun for years now. That has given me ample opportunity to test this practice. While it isn’t my only approach to managing upper respiratory infections, it does offer the most immediate results. It’s also extremely affordable to just keep some of these dried herbs in stock when compared to other herbal medicines like tinctures, infused honey, elderberry syrup, and probiotics.
What is your closest Lamiacean plant ally? Have you harvested and dried your herbs for winter yet?
<3 Roxoxoxo
love the mint family & learning from you. herbal streams are the best!