Medicine chest 4(a) - infused oils, two barks and a root

Since the first two items up today are made into "infused oils", I'll start by describing the method for making them in your kitchen. This will be review for some of you but review never hurts!

It's a pretty straightforward process, especially when working with materials that are fairly dry to begin with, like the barks, and they're unlikely to cause you much trouble. But whoa nelly, it can go really wrong, really quickly with other parts of a plant, in which case it's still simple but not necessarily easy. With moisture laden materials like juicy leaves or gooey roots (I'm looking at you, comfrey!) you have to be on the ball or can go all south pretty badly.

But I was thinking about that not long ago and it strikes me that it's kinda cool that an oil can become so riddled, so quickly, with slimy, scary looking mold; I take it as an indication that the stuff we're working with is teeming with life on the microscopic level.

I'm always comforted to know that life on a microscopic level is teeming somewhere nearby. We'd be in a mess of trouble if it wasn't.



One way around having your oil turn into a creepy science experiment is to use the heat method, ie place your plant material with enough oil to cover it generously into a double boiler, then heat gently until the colour changes and the fragrance tells you that the oil is permeated with the 'good stuff' from the plant. Then just strain the oil and Bob's your uncle, it's ready. However, I don't like the final product of that method as much, or at least I haven't been happy with any I've made so far. The plant material ends up sort of 'cooked', the fragrance of the oil (I use olive oil) changes when heated and I find the whole thing goes 'off' in other, less obvious ways, within a few months .. all in all, after having used both methods, I find that if the cold infused oil gets past those critical first couple of weeks, it lasts longer. So I prefer the following method, problematic though it sometimes might be.

When I make an infused oil from a bark, I cut quite small branches and twigs from the tree; the thickness of any of my fingers will do (so, as thick as my thumb down to as thin as my pinkie). Or, in the case of aspen, I collect fallen branches, sometimes quite big ones, that come down in early summer windstorms. Entire trees of aspen often just come down for no particular reason (that a human can see), storm or no storm, which means there's rarely a time I've been short of the stuff. It also means aspen is not a great tree to put in your yard!

So I get a big bowl and a sharp pen knife and sit down with my branches and twigs and start peeling bark. It's one of my favourite things to do, and here we pause as the fragrances of the fresh-peeled bark and the newly exposed wood waft through my imagination ..

.. mmm ..

Once that's done, I go at the long strips of bark with my kitchen scissors, snip snip, til they're all an inch or so long (no need to be anal). If the bark feels a little damp, I sometimes let it sit overnight to air out, but often enough I can go right to the next step of piling it all into a scrupulously clean and DRY wide mouthed jar. I fill it 2/3 full, no more. Then I just pour the oil on til it comes about an inch from the top of the jar.

Next, using one of my newly peeled sticks, I poke at my jar full of bark and oil. Bubbles start to rise. Poke poke poke .. let sit .. poke some more .. then I take a piece of paper and secure it around the mouth of the jar with an elastic band or piece of string. I poke small holes in that, quite a few. This allows for any moisture laden air to get out, and that's important. I put the jar on a plate and that goes somewhere I can keep an eye on it - AWAY  from direct light - and over the course of the next few days or maybe weeks I continue to poke it until no more bubbles appear. The first few days are critical, and it is IMPERATIVE  that the bark or herb remain under the surface of the oil. Once I'm confident all is well, I give it a proper lid, put it away somewhere and forget about it for at least 6 weeks. Labels are a good idea - not that I always label, I guess I must love the excitement of trying to remember which oil is which. (Do as I say, not as I do, ha!). When I get around to straining my oils (often far more than 6 weeks later) I put some coarse salt, just enough to cover the bottom of the jar, in first, then pour the strained oil on top of that. That's a neat trick; any leftover moisture that could spoil the oil is drawn into the salt, thus preserving it.

The procedure is the same for all infused oils, it's just the amount of checking and fussing that varies. Generally, fresh materials or newly dried materials are preferable to long-dried, finely chopped or powdered materials (just like with tinctures). Those will act like sponges, soaking up the oil more than they release their goodness into it, and you'll have a helluva battle on your hands to get it all strained & squeezed out.

Trembling Aspen infused oil - If you don't have trembling aspen in your neck of the woods, you can use cottonwood, they're cousins. I've written about it before, so you may be rolling your eyes at the repetition, but I keep on about it because this oil is one of the most useful things imaginable to anyone who ever has an ache or stiffness (and who doesn't? Use your body a lot, it aches. Don't use it, it will ache even more!) Aspen and cottonwood are also very common trees, so if you've got a hankering to start collecting from the wild and turning your loot into something useful, this is a great place to start.

Aspen oil is just the ticket - it's analgesic (pain relieving), relaxes tension and seems to promote healing. We use it more for large muscles (like my husband's back after chopping wood), but I find it works really well on my aching knees, too. You'd normally think of aching knees as a joint issue, but knees have tendons and other 'soft tissues' in them, not just bone. Because generously slathering aspen just above my knees before bed can keep them from seemingly bursting into flames and waking me up at night, I've come to the conclusion that my issue lies in the quadricep tendons. Persnickety things, tendons.

I've also found that aspen dramatically quelled the bursitis in my hips. As in, having been troubled with that for some years, off and on, the aspen stopped it and it hasn't returned nearly as often as it used to. It now bothers me a couple of times a year rather than night after night for goddamn weeks at a time. Aspen combined with mullein root is my go-to when my sacroiliac joint goes out (man I hate that). Between them and the (carefully done) move I learned from my physiotherapist, I can get that little bastard back into place quite easily now. Pretty cool, eh?

(In case you're wondering where all these joint issues of mine came from, I had a home cleaning biz for a decade .. so be nice to your cleaning lady, she's wrecking her body to keep your house clean. And if you make aspen oil, maybe give her some!)

There isn't much information 'out there' about the 'active ingredients' in aspen, other than that it contains acetylsalicylic acid, which explains the anti-inflammatory and analgesic action. There are lots of plants with that magic ingredient, but they don't all work in the same way, or equally. Aspen has something more, obviously, and if you ask me (and my husband) it's got something to do with the fragrance. That fragrance, woodsy, kinda spicy, a little sweet, starts to relieve the stress that accompanies pain as soon as it hits the nostrils; it takes a little while longer before the pain relieving action itself kicks in. I suspect, because of this, that long-dried bark wouldn't work as well. When I work with the fresh bark, peeling and whittling it, I can feel, as well as smell, those resins that produce the fragrance; my fingers and knife get a little tacky from them. If that's gone, we lose at least half the medicine.

That's true of many, probably most, of the medicinal plants. Their actions are a synergy between all the components making each one unique unto itself. Hence (part of) my prejudice against essential oils, they're just not going to offer the same benefits as whole fresh plant materials, now are they? No, they're not.

Aspen bark can also be made into a tincture to be taken orally, which I've done out of curiosity, and there's a flower essence, which I have not made because aspen flowers bloom such a short period of time, and they're about 20 ft up the tree, making them just a little out of my reach. I've found the tincture (I use 10-15 drops) definitely has both the pain relieving and cheering/calming qualities in common with the oil .. but since I'd rather go to the source of pain (ie use the oil topically on the tissues in question), I haven't used it often enough to pronounce it as something everyone should try.

The flower essence is used for calming anxiety, which makes sense if we consider the Doctrine of Signatures - it's "trembling aspen" after all, which indicates it could be used for trembling, fearful people. That makes me wonder if the tincture would be of use in illnesses that manifest with tremors, like Parkinson's .. hmm, probably not. But aspen in one form or another is probably useful for tremors in overused or even atrophied muscles. Food for thought there?

Crazy as it might sound, the Doctrine of Signatures (ie something about a plant's appearance, behaviour or the environment it grows in resembles the symptom/illness it can cure) has been part of plant medicine lore in every culture, in every part of the world. It's (partly) because of this that we herbalists can say "the plant told me how to use it". The more I work with plants, the more I appreciate the old doctrine, and the more potential I see for its use in the future.

And I see I've written far more than I expected to today, yet I still have another bark and a root to get to. We'll get to those in the next post in this series, then, shall we? That'll be 4(b). Ha!