Yarrow is a member of the huge asteracea family, with nearly 13000 species spread across 1500 genuses and the most evolved family of the dicotyledons, It grows all over the place and often in abondance, along roadsides, wastelands, prairies often indicating a dry, un-alkaline type soil.
Its latin name refers to Achilles, the famous Greek hero of the Trojan war, who used yarrow to help heal the many wounds suffered by his army and millefeuille meaning a thousand leaves, which refers to the way the leaves are divided.. I love Yarrow, I love Yarrow for its availability and dependability and diversity of uses. As we all know it is a great plant for cuts and wounds, it not only helps heal the physical wound but also the emotional wound that often goes with the shock of an accident. Yarrow’s complexity is seen in the way that the flower has developped, it is a corymb of tiny corymbs, a highly evolved genus within in an already highly evolved family. This complexity and intensity can also be found in its taste, which is an explosion of diffferent layers, spicy, aromatic, tannic, balsamic, bitter, pungent, camphory to name but a few. It has something deep about it, its healing goes deep, deep into scars, on a physical level it is a good emergency plant as its ability to go deep into a wound and at the same time disinfect it is a most valuable tool, this ability to go deeply occurs also on emotional and subtle levels. I have used Yarrow essential oil to help heal wounds occuring in my,subtle bodies and really felt a consolidating and scarring taking place mending a ‘wound’ that was loosing energy rather than blood. On many occassions I have had feed back from others and personal experience of Yarrow revealing deep emotional wounds that are ready to be dealt with, it seems to have the ability to go to places that have been inaccessible.
On a more concret level, I find Yarrow very helpful in tea mixes for issues related to the female, hormonal cycle, its progesterone-like action makes it an important element, I like to put both progesterone and oestrogen-like plants in these mixes, feeling that the organism will choose what it needs. However Yarrow at the same time fulfils an important role of a chologogue helping the liver to clean out any hormones that are waste material- thus fulfilling a double role or maybe even triple if we tale into account its circulatory action helping the removal of these spent hormones from the liver.
Cathy Skipper 