Medicine chest 4(b) - the 2nd bark (alder) as infused oil and tincture

I'm still just getting to know the tree medicines. Up until the last couple of years I've spent most of my time looking down at annuals and perennials, those green jewels that grow in my yard and in the many wild meadows in our rural area (including hay fields, there's a lot grows on the edge of a hayfield besides hay and hay fields aren't sprayed).

I wander into forests plenty often (with permission from the landowners) (mostly ..), but I do very little harvesting there. Many of the plants that grow on the forest floor of a mature hardwood forest tend to be rare so I leave them be. Mature trees are not easy to harvest from, they're just too damn tall for me to reach their branches!

But on the edges of forests, along streams, along bike paths and trails, there are trees young and small enough that I can (respectfully, carefully) harvest a young branch or some twigs. Young trees are often plentiful in cities, too, and if the area isn't a manicured park, there's no reason why urban folk can't branch out (lol, sorry) into working with bark. Wildcrafting in cities is perfectly acceptable practice.



As a rule, it's the inner bark that's the part we want to work with. If we harvest from the youngest branches, though, the outer bark is so thin as to not matter if it's included. If you find yourself with big logs of the thicker barked trees, then it's a more difficult process of removing the bark, letting it dry (sometimes for a year or more) and trying to separate the layers. Or sometimes the bark is soaked to get the layers apart, it really depends on the species of tree. I once tried to get some inner bark from a log of white oak from our firewood - I won't be doing that again, what a pain! It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, please don't be a jerk and take bark from the trunk of a living tree, that wound will leave it open to disease and bug infestations and eventually kill it. I've seen evidence of so-called 'professional wildcrafters' doing that and if I ever catch them in a dark alley they'll be bloody sorry!


Alder bark - NB not 'elder', that's different! - Alder (Alnus) is a big family, so check your field guide or ask someone who knows these things to find out what sort you have in your area. Kiva Rose (excellent, well respected herbalist who I learned about alder from, I'll link you below) has huge trees - she lives in New Mexico. Ours here in the wilds of Quebec are weedy little critters, so different you'd be hard pressed to say they're in the same family. Yet they are, and they share the same medicinal actions, as well as the same general environment and serving the same purpose within that environment. Alders grow near water, their roots tending to entwine; in this way they hold onto the banks of stream and river, lake and pond, helping to prevent soil from washing away. They also help to keep that water clean - in fact there's a saying, "if you don't see alder, don't drink the water!". Good to know!

Our alders gather in large colonies. They love damp, swampy areas (and as we have a lot of beavers here, we have a lot of swamps ..) as much as they do streams and river edges. In fact, once alder has colonized an area successfully, those swamps' edges become more defined, turning them into ponds and lakes with visible streams leading into and out of them. That's something to remember when we get to talking about alder's 'signatures', below.

Alder has many, many uses. The wood of the large trees resists rot (the pilons that hold up the buildings in Venice are made of alder), the leaves can be used to rid your house of fleas. Alder has been in use by humans for so long that it's steeped in the folklore and myth of many different cultures, look it up if you like such things (I sure do!). As usual, I'll let you do your own in-depth research, and use this post to give you a feel for its uses for the 'home herbalist'.

Mostly I use alder as an infused oil as discussed in the last post. I don't just use the bark to make the oil, I include tender twigs and the (to my eye adorable) cones and catkins that dangle from the branches as well. This is another way alders vary, the timing of the appearance of the cones & catkins and when they flower will differ between regions so again, your mileage will vary. Ours are at their sticky peak in late summer.

Sticky is the word. Once I start snipping them up into my bowl along with the strips of bark, they start to stick to the blades of the scissors and my fingers. That's a good sign, of course, that sticky resin is the good stuff. And remarkably - it 'gets' me every time I make it - that sticky resin, once infused in the oil, makes an incredibly viscous, slippery product. The fragrance is sweet and a little cherry like. Lovely stuff.

It's a little difficult for me to describe when I choose to use alder oil over the aspen oil I told you about last time. I guess I would say it's when the pain or injury is more acute or there's a degree of inflammation. It's one of those decisions I make by the look on the person's face, there's a worried, harassed-by-the-pain look about the person who needs alder. Those nasty little knots deep inside in a muscle, or cricks in the neck that won't let you turn your head, those are alder issues. When a muscle is really pulled and there's heat, that's an indication for alder. It's a cooling oil. I very often combine it with aspen and in some cases (like the neck crick) mullein root.

Alder oil served me well when I had that nasty (horrible, please God don't let me go there again) rib pain a while back, one of many topicals that I combined during that oh-so-educational incident. In the end, I settled on St John'swort (oil topically and tincture by mouth) for the nerve pain, alder oil for the searing, tearing burning sensation every time I took a breath and mullein root (both topically and by mouth) to help get the disc in my thoracic spine to settle back down (which was the source of the trouble). FYI, while that was going on I was also taking mullein syrup to keep my lungs clear. If you have a rib thing, you must keep the lungs clear.

Alder tincture is valuable as well, and here again I use the bark, twigs, cones & catkins. It's a kick-ass antibacterial with an affinity for the blood. It's used for problems with the movement (or lack there of) of fluids in the body, as well .. this is our Doctrine of Signatures again, red being the signature for plants that help to clean the bloodstream, and alder being 'at home' near the water being a signature for issues like poor movement of fluids and/or 'boggy' tissue states.

What the hell is a boggy tissue state, you ask? Think swollen gums. Think leaky gut, where the intestinal tissues are swollen, yet permeable where they shouldn't be. Think swollen glands where the lymphatic fluid just isn't moving as it ought to, to clear out an infection. Again, here's our signature of swampy ground, when what we want is a clean flowing stream, right?

Alder, as a tincture, can be used frequently in small doses when there's an acute issue to be dealt with, or taken once a day when the situation is low-grade and chronic. It's astringent, too, meaning it tones tissues which in turn helps to prevent infection from taking hold or spreading.

As an important aside - When it comes to bacterial (or fungal) infections, herbalists are big on terrain, ie we know the importance of what we call correcting 'tissue states', making them less amenable to the wrong microbes settling into the wrong places. Antibiotics can't do that, and that's the primary difference between using herbs and using drugs. It's also what's wrong with much of what passes for herbal medicine today, as people want to use herbs as weapons just like they use drugs, to kill kill kill, unaware that herbal medicine is better suited to heal heal heal. Once you start working with herbs correctly you don't have to keep resorting to the weapons of war that are so detrimental in the long term.

Please note that if you make bark tincture, dry the bark for a few days first. Fresh bark is emetic (makes ya barf). That may not be the case for all species of alder, but I don't take chances, it ain't worth it.

And now I will defer to the brilliant Kiva Rose. As a clinical practitioner she has more experience than I do, and case studies that give a much better picture of how alder works. Her excellent monograph is here. (Note made Jan. 2019 - I see that link is not currently available. Poor Kiva's site was tragically hacked, but as I know she is doing everything possible to retrieve all old articles and put them on her new site, I'll leave the link in case it's up and working again in the future.)

I'm not sure whether alder preparations are available commercially. If they are, your best bet is to look for someone who makes small batches so you can be assured of good quality. It's also so easy to find, once you identify the trees, and so easy to make into an infused oil or a tincture, I encourage anyone interested to go forth and wildcraft their own.

Okay .. since I'm told I pack so much into a post that people have to read it twice or three times to get it all to sink in, and I've even added a rather long link, that's enough for today. And do read the link, it's worth it!

There will be a third part to this series-within-a-series so we can get to that root; comfrey, by the way.

I'll see you for 4(c) in a couple of days!