Posted: Tue Jul 05, 05 10:38 pm Post subject: Meadowsweet
If anyone is feelign adventurous, it's just coming into flower in these parts.
You can ise it for flavouring mead (from which it gets its name), and that's kind of nice eventually I've found, but oddly sickening till it's had a year in the bottle. Then you can serve it with confidence.
I've yet to find any other good uses for it. Any ideas anyone?
Treacodactyl Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
Posted: Wed Jul 06, 05 6:10 am Post subject:
It's a good ingredient of pot pourri as I think it fixes the other smells.
I've a book out on herbal teas at the moment and it recommends meadowsweet as sweet, delicate and very aromatic, using the leaves or flowers as a tea or the roots as a decoction. Would there be much difference in taste between roots and leaves/flowers does anyone know?
(Meadowsweet is probably going to turn out to be my next self-heal...both seeds I have had from the RHS and am now nurturing three meadowsweet seedlings. TD keeps pointing out self-heal in people's lawns, fields, wastelands and calling it "that plant you bought" ).
Meadowsweet flowers are milder and more aromatic than the leaves. The leaves taste like cat pee. Really nasty, I think, but some people seem to like a tea made fro them.
I have a pic, but I'll have to find it and scan it. Remind me.
Medicinally, it's got a lot of salicylic acid in it, which is otherwise known as asprin. It can be used as a really mild painkiller, but to be honest you're better off taking an asprin tablet, which has much, much more asprin in it than meadowsweet does.
).
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