St. John's Wort is flowering like crazy in the Adelaide Hills at the moment. Yesterday, I went harvesting in the heat and I thought I'd write a little about it for you.
I've used Hypericum perforatum for a few years now for things related to our nerves. The petals with their jagged edges, looking almost frayed and those stamen pointing all over the place remind me of nervous conditions frazzled nerves.I like to think of the stamn as reminding me of the nerves in our fingers and toes. This is apt becausr Hypericum is particularly suited to painful injuries in thse nerve-rich areas.
The bright uplifting yellow of the flower is what we need when our nerves are frayed and I found yesterday when I was out harvesting some, that I could easily differentiate it from the other yellows of the many plants from the Daisy family in flower at the moment.
St. John's Wort is a flower of the Sun. Most herbs are harvested early in the day, before the sun hits them with its full strength but St. John’s Wort likes to be picked on a warm sunny afternoon. Yesterday really fit the bill!
It's an interesting plant in that the oil squeezed from the yellow flowers is a dark red. In my first year of harvesting, my hands looked like a scene from Macbeth! I had crushed so many petals with my clumsy technique. This year though, a mild reddening of index finger and thumb was all, as I'd learned how to be a bit more delicate. The bloody red pic is a staged one to show how much oil can come from one flower.
Have you used St.John's Wort before? Do you use it now? Please share your personal experiences.
Some of you may have seen that I've been writing a series of posts about making herbal remedies at home. I want to share what I know of this topic so that, as the world gets crazier, folks will have other avenues of medical care, namely those of themselves and their community. If you look back over this blog, you can see heaps of info on the topic, plus loads and loads of posts on herbs and using Australian bushfoods from a white perspective. If you haven't been around on in the 
