Amaranthus Health Uses

Amaranthus is much admired amongst the medical community. Its medicinal attributes have been long known. Practitioners of alternative medicine are much enthused by its possibilities for alternative remedies. Healing is only one of its qualities along with cures for other things.

Amaranthus has other names beyond this common name, by which it is best known by the florists of our days. It is also called flower-gentle, flower-velure, floramor and velvet-flower.

It being a garden flower, and well known to everyone that keeps it, I might forbear the description; yet notwithstanding, because some desire it, I shall give it. It runs up with a stalk a cubit high, streaked, and somewhat reddish towards the root, but very smooth and good for healing, divided towards the top with small branches, among which stand broad long leaves of a reddish green color and slippery. The flowers are not properly flowers, but tufts, very beautiful to behold, but of no smell of a reddish color; if you bruise them, they yield juice of the same color. Being gathered, they keep their beauty a long time. The seed is of a shining black color.

They continue to flower from August until the frost nips them.

Amaranthus is under the dominion of Saturn, and is an excellent qualifier of the unruly actions and passions of Venus, although Mars also should join with her. The flowers dried, and beaten into powder, stop the terms of women and so do almost all other red things. And by the icon and image of every herb the ancients first discovered their virtues. Modern writers laugh at them for it, but I wonder in my heart how the virtue of herbs came at first to be known, if not by the signatures. The moderns have them from the writing of the ancients, and the ancients had no writings to have them from. But to proceed: the flowers stop all fluxes of blood, whether in man or woman, bleeding either by the nose or wound. There is also another sort of amaranthus which bears a white flower, which stops the whites in women, and the running of the reins in men, and is a most singular remedy for venereal disease.

The anemone, on the other hand, is also called wind-flower, because they say the flowers never open but when the wind blows. Pliny is my author; if it be not so, blame hime, not me. The seed also, if it bears any at all, flies away with the wind.

They are sown usually in the gardens of the curious, and flower in spring. As for the description, I shall pass by it, they being well known to all those that sow them.

It is under the dominion of Mars, being supposed to be a type of crow-foot. The leaves provoke the terms mightily, being boiled and the infusion drunk. The body being bathed with the precipitate of them can cure leprosy. The leaves being stamped, and the juice snuffed up the nose, purges the head greatly, so does the root being chewed in the mouth, for it causes much spitting.

Author: Timothy Payn