How to Read Any Herb Without Looking It Up

0:00Here's one of the coolest things about being an herb list. You can take a herb that you already know is safe, something perhaps from your kitchen, just put a little bit of it on your tongue. And before you look up a single thing about it, it's already telling you how it wants to work in your body. You just have to know how to listen. Here's what I mean. How an herb taste is one of the most important things you can know about it. Not whether you like happen to like it or not like it, but instead what the taste itself is actually telling you. This taste isn't random. Each taste points to what a plant actually does. So in herbal medicine, we have five tastes. And each one is a doorway into what an herb can do. Once I saw how much taste could tell us, this was a couple decades ago, I saw it and I saw how important it is and I dove in deep to understand it myself. And then I saw that this was often a crucial missing piece of herbalism. So I wanted a way to just hold it all in one place where you can look at an herb and then take in its taste, its qualities and its actions all at once.

1:01So I made the flavor wheel. This is a blueprint or a visual representation of energetic herbalism. And my first version of this was released in 2013. And since then, it's been downloaded more than 100,000 times, which is kind of mind blowing. You can get your copy of the flavor wheel within my free mini herbal energetics course. That's happening right now. And it's happening for a short time only. We only open this up once a year in September. So check out the show notes or the video description, depending on where you're watching or listening to this to get your link to register. Or you could simply go to herbalminiadventure.com. Also one more note before I dive in, I'm filming this out in my garden. So if you're listening to the podcast, you might want to jump over to YouTube and see the plants that I'm going to talk about in real life. All right. So to give you a real taste of the flavor wheel, I'm going to give you one herb for each of the five flavors. And for each one, I'm going to walk the same path from how it tastes to what the taste

2:01is telling you to what the plant can do. Let's start with bitter hops, or it's cool botanical name, humulus, lupulus. And yes, of course, this is the same hops that gives beer. It's bitter bite. Taste a hops tea. And there's really no mistaking, right? It's bracingly bitter. And it has an aromatic, almost resinous edge to it as well. And that bitterness is doing something the instant it touches your tongue. So bitter is a taste that wakes up digestion. Your mouth waters. Your body starts redding. It's digestive juices. Your bile begins to move, which helps you digest fats. This is why bitter herbs have been worked with first-legged stagnant digestion for basically as long as we have records. And hops is really a lovely example of this. It's that bitter aromatic quality that makes it a wonderful digestive herb for the person who feels heavy and stuck after meals, especially when there's tension tangled up in that as well. But here's something I find especially fascinating with hops.

3:02So we tend to think that taste happens only on the tongue, right? But now we know there are bitter receptors all over, right? And even further down in the gut itself. And a recent human study on hops found that when the bitterness reaches the gut, the body responds by releasing the very hormones that tell you that you've had enough to eat, that you feel full and satisfied. And what this shows is that your body reads bitterness as information every step along the way. Not just your mouth, right? And that to me is energetic made visible. So in other words, taste is a language the whole body understands. So of course, on the flavor will, you're going to find hops in the bitter section. It's a bitter, cooling, relaxing herb. Has a long friendship with sleep. Not necessarily for everyone who lies awake, but for a very particular person, like someone who's like hot and restless and wound up with a really busy mind that just won't settle. And for that person hops is a quiet, cooling companion. And you can see why in the taste, right?

4:03It's bitter, it's cooling, it eases an overheated, overly tense system. Hops is more of medicine than food. Usually we take it as a tea or a tincture. If you take pharmaceutical sedatives or antidepressants or your pregnant, then really large doses are worth just setting aside or talking with a clinical herbalist first. But if you taste just a little bit of it, you can notice how much that plant's already telling you. You know, bitter, so it moves digestion, cooling and relaxing, so it suits heat and tension. So by simply tasting and feeling hops, you can know a lot about it before. You read a single word about it. Next up is the sweet flavor, and I don't mean sugary. So an herbal energetic sweet points to herbs that build and nourish and moisten, things that soften and soothe. So the classic sweet herb, one of my favorites to feel, is marshmallow, alfia, aficionales. So if you taste or feel a cold infusion of marshmallow root, you'll understand this instantly.

5:04It's slippery, silky, a little slick, almost gooey even. In herbal terms, we call this a demolsint, and it comes from the plant's musulage. Similar to cooked oats or okra, this is one of our most important actions, the demolsint action. So on the flavor whale, of course, marshmallow sits in the sweet section, it's cooling and moistening, and that slippery sweetness tells you exactly what it does. It coats, it soothes, moistenes, whatever is hot, dry and irritated. So picture having, say like a dry raw scratchy throat, or a dry, relentless hacking cough that just won't bring anything up, or dry, irritated tissues anywhere from the digestive tract to the urinary system. So marshmallow is the soft, cool, moistening balm for all of this. And here's a piece that I love, because it's such a hopeful way to think about inflammation, especially. A lot of irritation in the body comes from dryness. So instead of simply trying to block that inflammation with an anti-inflammatory, marshmallow

6:07tends to the dryness underneath it. So it's not suppressing anything, it's restoring what was missing. Marshmallow is unusual in that you don't need to heat it to prepare it. Instead you can make a cold infusion, and how you do that is you fill a jar about a third of the way with the dried root, and then you fill the jar with cool room temperature water. Let that sit for at least a few hours, I usually do overnight. And then what you pour off is this silky and soothing tea. And if you grow marshmallow, you can also make a tea from the leaves as well. Marshmallow is considered safe for just about everyone, but one thing to know is to take it a little apart from medication, since all that muselage could potentially alter how things absorb. So sweet, cooling, moistening, soft, right where the body needs it, where it's gone dry, and you can fill every bit of that on your tongue. The wonderful flavor, sweet. And that brings us to pungent, which is admittedly a sort of weird name for our aromatic plants,

7:07but where sweet is soft and nourishing, pungent is the opposite energy. It's warming, it moves, it opens things up. So think of like the heat of ginger or the spread of a spicy meal through your whole chest, right? Pungent herbs are ideal for people who feel cool, or for situations when we want to warm someone up, like for example, to support the fever process when someone feels cold. So for this one, I'm going to use a plant that I love dearly, holy basil, also called Tulsi, the awesome one, sanctum, or this one's awesome one, africanum. So Tulsi has been revered in India for thousands of years, and once you get to know it, you can understand why. When you smell it and taste it, it's aromatic, it's warm, a little spicy, has a soft sweetness behind it too. On the wheel, holy basil, of course, in the pungent section, warming, drying, pungent, aromatic herbs like this tend to get things moving, right? They warm you up from the inside, they can wake up sluggish digestion, and their fragrance has a way of lifting a heavy mood too.

8:09And that aroma leads straight to what Tulsi is best known for. Aromatic pungent plants have a long relationship with the nervous system, and Tulsi is a wonderful example of that. It's calming and clarifying at once. That's what we call an adaptogen, anorelaxing nerveine, which means it helps to study a person who's maybe stretched thin by stress. It can quiet a busy mind, and it brings a kind of clear present focus as well. And it can calm without dulling you, right? So I think of it for frazzled, overworked, spread tooth-in folks, which you might know a little bit about. The simplest way to enjoy this is in tea. I just use a teaspoon of the dried leaf and then just a cup of boiled water, steeped, covered for three to five minutes. You want those aromatic oils to stay in. It's genuinely a lovely thing to drink, so you can really sit with it and enjoy it. One note worth knowing if you're trying to conceive or your pregnant or your managing blood sugar with medication, Tulsi is one you just want to look into a little bit more closely first. So warming, drying, aromatic, uplifting, all of that's waiting for you in the very first

9:14sip of this pungent aromatic herb. It's so lovely. The truth is salty. And this one might surprise you because salty and herbal terms isn't really about the flavor of salt on your tongue, just like sweet isn't about sugar, right? But it points to a plant your body reads as mineral rich, like the way a good broth is. So nettle, or ertica diosha, is the queen of this. Drink a strong nettle infusion and what you taste is deep and green and almost brothy, right? It's closer to a soup really than a tea. And that flavor is the mineral content itself and your body reads it as nourishment because that's exactly what it is. In fact, nettle is considered one of the richest sources of minerals among the plant foods and you can really taste it. So on the flavor whale, nettle sits in the salty section and it's cooling and drying and its gift is simple and profound. It feeds you. So nettles, what we call a nutritive herb and that's a whole category that we can easily overlook because it's not dramatic, right?

10:15It's not pungency, right? It's not warming. It doesn't do this like big flashy thing. It simply restores. Herbalists reach for nettle to strengthen bones and hair and nails and teeth to rebuild energy in someone who's run down and to study a body that's simply depleted. As David Hoffman once said, went in doubt, choose nettle. And herbalists have just taken that line and run with it. Nettle has another well-loved gift worth mentioning. Nettle is a nourishing infusion and the weak leading up to allergy season helps many people with seasonal sniffles and hay fever. It's slightly drying and a stringent quality is really part of that reason, but it also does something deeper. There's a lot of wonderful gifts in nettle. And it's beautifully safe. Nettle carries the highest safety rating there is and it's worked with as food as much as medicine. And the way I like it, as mentioned, a nourishing infusion. So I use a good handful by weight. It's like an ounce of the dried nettle and a quart jar filled with just boiled water covered.

11:16Lettuce it for four to eight hours overnight is what I do. And you strain and drink it. And it's one of the simplest, most restorative things you can do for yourself. Something I enjoy practically every day. Because nettle leans a little drying, if you ever find it too drying for you, you can simply pair it with a moistening herb like the marshmallow we just met. So salty, cooling drying, mineral deep, all of that, waiting in a plain green cup. And we definitely caught stinging nettle for a reason. As I was sitting down here, it stung me through my leggings. So it's a little gracious this time of year, but oh, how I love it. Well, let's begin our next plant with a story from Ireland. So in the 1800s, there was a country doctor named Dr. Green. He lived in NS and County Claire. And he built a reputation for helping people with failing hearts. So the swelling in the legs, the brasslessness, the weakness, and he was actually helping where other doctors could do nothing. And so people were clamoring to know his secrets. You know, what was he using?

12:16How was he helping so many in such a notable way? But he would not tell a soul how. And he actually kept his remedy secret his entire life. And it was only when he died in 1894 that his daughter, thankfully and finally revealed her father's famous cure, had been. And there's a simple tincture of ripe Hawthorne berries, which is the perfect example of a sour herb. Sour is bright. It's the pucker of a fresh berry. It's refreshing and quick and it tends to cool. Hawthorne is a hedgerow plant. It's a small, thorny tree covered in white blossoms in the spring and deep red berries in the fall. And taste the berries. You get that sour brightness with that soft sweetness underneath. Then perhaps a slight drawing or puckering feeling in your mouth. That's a stringency and a stringency belongs to the sour taste. So hold on to that feeling because it's about to tell you something. While Hawthorne is considered sour, its qualities are close to neutral.

13:16So maybe it's a little cooling but really it's neutral. So that's part of what makes it such a friendly herb. It suits almost everyone whether you run warm or cool or damp or dry. So follow that taste. Sour and bright points you towards plants that cool, that protect and that modulate inflammation. And that puckering a stringency points you towards tone, towards tissues being drawn back together and made whole. And you put those two together and you're standing right in front of what Hawthorne is for. It's one of the most beloved herbs for the heart. We call it a heart trofo restorative which is a wonderful word that simply means it nourishes and restores the heart over time. The way good food does. It's rich in the kinds of plant compounds that support the heart's own resilience, its own capacity to protect itself. And those are the very compounds you tasted as sour and astringent. Modern research on Hawthorne extracts has really caught up with what herb lists have known. And the strong evidence comes from a Cochrane review which is about as rigorous as medicine

14:27gets because what they do is they look at a bunch of studies. So researchers pooled 10 randomized double-blown placebo controlled trials of a standardized Hawthorne extract in this case. It was leaf and flower. And they gave it alongside people who were taking heart medication. And throughout the studies the people taking Hawthorne did measurably better. They could exert themselves longer before tiring, they were less restless, less fatigued, and their hearts were just working more efficiently doing the same work on less oxygen. And they just felt better in themselves. Any side effects were few mild and passing. Hawthorne tends to the emotional heart too. Herbalists reach for it for grief, for heartbreak, for the heart that's carrying something heavy. And that a single plant speaks to the heart in both senses at once. The lovely thing about Hawthorne too is that it's food like. So you can take the berries, the leaves and the flowers as a tea, or you can cook the berries down into something closer to a jam or a syrup or even barbecue sauce as my new favorite.

15:28You can enjoy it daily over the long term, which is how it works best. So it's slow, nourishing, and cumulative. And while Hawthorne is generally regarded as safe, if you take heart medications, Hawthorne's worth talking through with someone experienced first, because your heart's precious, deserves that kind of care. So sour, bright, cooling, protective, this flavor is filled with herbs that modulate inflammation, protect the eyes and restore toned tissues. I love that as we're talking about how bright this sour taste is, the sun really came out and it was lit up. This Hawthorne behind me. Super bright. Thank you, son. So there you have it. Five flavors, five herbs, experiencing and understanding the flavors is absolutely one of the most useful skills you can have as an herbalist because it basically opens up the language of plants to you. So next time you taste like a strongly bitter herb, you'll know it can be used to promote digestion. And the next time you fill the warmth of a pungent herb, you know, it'll be good match for someone who feels cold.

16:30And that's the whole art, really. And it works with any herb that you'll ever meet, as long as it's safe to taste, of course. And this is exactly what the flavor wheel is for. It has all five flavors. They're taste, they're qualities, they're actions all in one place. So you can look up an herb and read it just like we did together. Of course, the most important part is that you experience it. So if you'd like to learn to use the wheel yourself step by step, I put together a free mini herbal energetics course that walks you all the way through it. It's free and once the wheel clicks, you really won't look at herbs the same way again. I also go through a safety protocol with herbs that I think is so simple, but it just sticks with you. So you'll never look at herbs the same way again. Go ahead and check the video description or the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening. And you can get the link to get your copy and get into the mini herbal energetics course. Also by the way, I'm hoping that the next podcast I do is answering all of your herbal energetics and flavor wheel questions. But in order to do that, I need your participation.

17:31So drop me a line in the comments or through the mini course or hit me up on my DMs. Let me know your burning or cooling herbal energetics questions. Thanks for joining me. See you next time. Thanks so much for listening. This podcast is made possible in part by our awesome students. This week's student spotlight is on Bonnie Hammersley in Maryland. Bonnie is a student in the herbal energetics course whose herbal journey has blossomed through curiosity, practice, and joyful exploration. From discovering a new appreciation for a dandelion to calling ginger a friend for life, she's developed really thoughtful relationships with the plants that she works with every day. One of our favorite stories was her family's tradition of adding a slice of ginger to soups as a poison indicator. A really charming reminder of how herbal wisdom is often passed from one generation to the next. To honor her contributions, Mountain Reserve's ascending Bonnie a $50 gift certificate to stock up on their incredible selection of organically and sustainably sourced herbal

18:32supplies. Thank you so much to Mountain Reserve's for supporting our amazing students.