Medicinal Monday - Fascinating Fireweed!

This is a tall showy wildflower that grows throughout North America. Traditionally the young shoots are collected in the spring by Native American because of its many medicinal uses.

About Fireweed

Fireweed thrives in open meadows, along streams, roadsides, and forest edges. In some places, it is so abundant that it can carpet entire meadows with brilliant pink flowers.  This hardy perennial is a member of the Primrose family that can grow from four to nine feet high. The leaves are narrow and scattered along long stems. The stems are topped by a spike of up to fifty or more pink to rose-colored flowers. The plant flowers from June to September. Each flower has a long cylindrical capsule bearing many seeds that have a tuft of silky hairs at the end that float through the air like whispy parachutes. This fluff can float quite far from the parent plant.

Medcinal and Practical Uses of Fireweed 

Native Americans used the entire plant for a variety of uses. The whole upper plant was used for medicine, the young shoots were steamed and eaten, the leaves were dried and made into a medicinal tea, the flowers were made into jelly, and the roots smashed and made into a poultice to treat boils, cuts, and infected wounds.  Fireweed tea is thought to promote longevity and health and has a smooth sweet floral flavor. It contains large amounts of vitamins C and B.

The fluff of the plant was used as stuffing and insulation. The Salish people of the Pacific Northwest coast wove fireweed with the down of mountain goat wool into blankets. The Dena'na of the Upper Inlet added fireweed to their dogs' food and treated pus-filled cuts by placing raw stems on the afflicted area.

Did You Know...

One fireweed plant can produce up to 80,000 seeds!

Fireweed is also known as great willow-herb, spiked willow-herb, rosebay, will-herb, wild asparagus, and purple rocket.

Fireweed is able to seed itself in severely burned areas and was one of the first plants to grow back after the eruption of Mount St. Helens. 

In Great Britain, it was called bombweed due to its rapid colonization of bomb craters in the Second World War.

In Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, he lists fireweed as one of the flowering plants returning tot he site of a bonfire inside the Old Forest.

In Russia, fireweed tea is called Ivan Chai.