Herbal ABCs: Iris

Herbal ABCs: Iris 🌿💟

The wild variety of striking garden dream, Iris versicolor, was honored and valued by native american tribes, so much so that many traveled with the bulbs to plant as they moved to a new location or even made their own artificial bogs or ponds to have access to this medicine.

In high doses, the fresh rhizome is a purgative and cathartic, which was needed more commonly in the past before many of the modern staples of society that limit our exposure to infections. Then, if one got, for instance, food poisoning, they would use these harsher cathartics and purgatives to flush it out of the system faster, through vomiting and diarrhea. This would limit the length and intensity of the infection and was a very important class of emergency medicines.

The Eclectics learned from the indigenous people of its power and began to use it. They used it to treat “bad blood” or the signs of long term infections that were more common concerns in the latter half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, like tuberculosis and progressed syphilis. This could look like leg or bed sores, ulcers, enlarged glands, stagnant lymph, fluids pooling, swelling, bruising and swallow or pale complexion. Iris was used to promote removal and excretion of waste in a compromised, or bogged down system. It has an affinity for the spleen, liver, throat and lymph.

Today, tinctures of the dried rhizome are still in our materia medica as a potent lymph mover-- which is an aspect of a healthy body that too often is forgotten about. The lymph system isn’t quite as famous as its parallelling circulatory system, but it is equally important. In addition to housing a lot of our immune cells, the lymph channels are like the gutters of the circulatory system, where waste from the blood and immune system are filtered out, recycled and removed from the system.

Stagnant lymph can be a key underlying imbalance to address so many symptoms- headaches, acne, psoriasis, eczema, thyroid conditions, hormone imbalances and more.

Comment if you want to learn more about your LYMPH! Bc I gots lots to say, but I’ve run out of space, as per usual 🤓🌿🙃