Yarrow smells of high summer – a warm, pungent, hypnotic, slightly narcotic scent coming forth from a cluster of white blossoms that form a moon-like flowering head growing from a woody stem with feathery leaves. The scent invites you into the deep dreams of an Athair Thalún, the father of the land, the Wild Redeemer who calls us back into the deep memory of wholeness. (His stories are lost to history and anthropology and literature, surviving only in the name of this hardy medicine plant that grows in the places the wild begins to reclaim – roadsides, hedgerows, vacant lots, and burned over fields.)
Lus na Fola – Herb of the Blood
To modern herbalists, Yarrow is best known for the ways it works with the blood – ways that are themselves mysterious.
Yarrow has an amazing capacity to staunch bleeding.. I learned from Matthew Wood and can verify from my own experience that this is not the remedy to reach for when you have a little nick, but it can be life-saving for treating deep gashes that bleed profusely. I employ Yarrow both internally and topically – packing or poulticing the wound with Yarrow leaves and flowers (fresh, dried, and powdered work equally well to stop the bleeding and prevent infection) and internally, giving high doses of the tincture (more practical in an emergency) or the tea (or in a pinch having someone chew on the flowers and the leaves. The tincture and the tea can help to slow internal bleeding as well. (Though I strongly advise getting medical attention as soon as possible in cases of internal bleeding – and also for deep gashes.)
I often use this property of Yarrow to explain the foolishness of the popular theory that people learned plant medicine primarily through trial and error. Ancient humans who got cut on sharp rocks or gored by wild Bison or mauled by Mountain Lions did not try dozens of plants to try to stop the bleeding and stumble on Yarrow by accident. Ancient humans were in constant conversation with the rest of the living world, and learned medicine from the plants directly – something we too have the capacity to do when we break the habits of thought and belief instilled in us by a culture that treats intelligence and communication as strictly human or strictly animal capacities.
Folk tradition tells us that Yarrow also provides protection to those working with sharp blades when hung in a workshop or a kitchen. Matthew Wood attests to its efficacy in that regard.
At the same time, by dilating the blood vessels, Yarrow helps to expand the circulation and disperse stagnant blood. Through vasodilation, Yarrow can aid in lowering blood pressure, in the healing of bruises, in the relief of menstrual cramping where the uterus feels cold and tight, in easing aches and pains resulting from the concentration of inflammatory factors brought on by blood stagnation, and, together with Yarrow’s ability to relax tension and open the pores, help fevers come through to resolution. Warming herbs like Ginger work wonderfully with Yarrow to stimulate the blood in moving through those dilated vessels. (I also found Yarrow, together with Hawthorn, Black Cohosh, and Lobelia to be indispensable in addressing acute COVID-19 infections, given that COVID-19 is in part a disease of vascular inflammation and constriction.)
Both Feet in Both Worlds
Through aiding the flow of blood, Yarrow aids in the flow of life and vitality. Where our blood flows, our awareness goes. So Yarrow helps in this way to bring us more fully into our bodies and into the world. At the same time, there is another dimension of Yarrow – the plant’s ability to expand our awareness into other levels of reality -- to experience the Otherworld, the spirit world, without leaving the “ordinary” world behind.
I discovered this dimension gathering Yarrow on a summer day on a dirt road in Maine many years ago, an experience I wrote about last year for Plant Healer Quarterly:
“I was tasting the blossoms and some of the young leaves to try to find the patches with the strongest medicine. I felt a strangely familiar warmth and a pronounced heightening of mynsenses. Though it was cloudy and it was late afternoon everything brightened.
“As, I continued up the dirt road toward I noticed a fresh bundle of Yarrow flowers, recentlypicked, on the ground. But no one else had driven or walked up that particular stretch of road that day – if they had, I would have seen or heard them from the house where I was living at the time.
“I turned around and the wind brought the scent of Roses. Right across from me were blooming Roses that I had never seen in that place before, though I walked that road every day.
“The scent alone opened my heart wide, and I felt at the edge of tears of gratitude and joy.
“I looked up and a Hawk circled overhead.
“The porous nature of the boundaries the self became clear. Rose mind, Hawk mind, Yarrow mind, seeped into my own consciousness.”
Echoes of the knowledge of Yarrow’s properties of awakening awareness of the patterns in the world exist in traditions as varied as the ancient Chinese practice of using Yarrow stalks to cast the I-Ching and the Irish folk practice of placing Yarrow beneath your pillow on Bealtaine or Samhain, times when the Otherworld is close at hand, in hopes of seeing the face of your future lover in your dreams. These properties of Yarrow may also account for common names Yarrow was given in Christian England such as “Devil’s Nettle” and “Bad Man’s Plaything.” (And here we come back to the fact that the “folkloric devil” is generally the embodiment of the exiled aspects of the wild masculine – in other words, Athair Thalún, Father of the Land. That includes the prophetic and visionary aspects of the masculine, which sneak into Christianity in the person of John the Baptist, the “voice crying out from the wilderness” who is celebrated just after the Summer Solstice. And in Irish culture, Yarrow is one of the herbs thrown into the bonfire on the bonfire to bring blessings on St. John’s Eve.)
The visionary state that Yarrow invites is similar to that brought on by Artemesia family plants like Mugwort and Wormwood and Sagebrush. But while Mugwort and Wormwood tend to bring the cool shimmering of the Aurora Borealis, Yarrow tends to bring a warmer luminosity, that brings together the glow of warm embers with the smoke that rises from them and the blue of the sky just before dawn. (In the one conversation I had with the late Dale Pendell he attributed this to Mugwort and Wormwood mostly containing Alpha Thujone while Yarrow mostly contains the Beta isomer of the molecule.)
For a deeper dive into the medicine, magic, and mysteries of this plant, join me for my class on Yarrow for the Otherworld Well Hedge School on Sunday, April 14, 2024 at 7:00 pm US Eastern Time (if you can’t make it live, or if you can, register before class to receive a recording the next day.) Details and registration at https://otherworldwell.com/blogs/news/yarrow
Wonderful read, Seán.
Yarrow was probably my very first plant companion that I discovered in childhood. It was growing all over the place and I pulled out my grandmother's old guide to folk plant medicine to find out what it was! The rest is history.
It was also one of the first plants I used to make my own medicine - I made a yarrow oil infusion. It proved to be worth its weight in gold after I was stung by jellyfish, which resulted in a 20 cm long burn that kept getting reinfected for months. Yarrow oil was what finally calmed it down. Afterwards, once the infection was gone, I was putting my calendula oil on it, which helped it fade away completely.
Thank you for this medicine and magic, yarrow is one of my favourites, it grows abundantly in the meadow beside my house, although it won’t be in bloom here for another couple of months, is it already flowering in Maine?