Herb Journal: Blue Vervain

Made a tea of blue vervain. First an infusion, but it didn't draw much from the plant, so I added some more, leaves and stalks, and simmered it for 15 minutes. Then let it sit for a while. I forgot about it so it got cold. I came back to it a while later, better for that, the tea had been given a chance to infuse even longer than I had intended, and heated it up again. I forgot the way that it tasted when we sampled it in class. The last few teas I had been making were so incredibly mild by comparison. Horsetail & Nettles taste like variations of a weak green tea, and so my taste buds had a big surprise with my first sip of blue vervain. Now, there is vervain and blue vervain. We were given samples of both in class. I decided to try blue vervain. I'll have to later make a tea of the vervain to see what the differences are. This is a VERY bitter tea. Wow. So in that sense it's a digestive bitter, and a sialagogue. Sialogogues stimulate the secretion of saliva from the salivary glands, and wow, does drinking this tea. The good thing about sialagogues and digestive bitters (of which this classifies as one), is that it aids digestion and the production of bile in the liver, which are all good things for your body and for cleansing. It is quite drying, which is something I always seem to notice right away since this climate is incredibly dry to begin with. But the thing that I was looking forward to the most was to evaluate the nervine aspect of this herb. Now, since it's already practically 3 am, it's not the best time to decide whether its the tea that is making me sleepy or the fact that it's way past my bedtime. So I'll have to come back to that another time. I wanted to try out this herb as a tea since I was still thinking about what I am going to add to my muscle relaxing salve, and blue vervain is one of the nervines recommended to use externally (in a salve, for example) as a muscle relaxant. But it has a few contenders: kava kava, passionflower, and motherwort, all nervines that would have similar, but not the same influence on the muscles... so it's a comparison game right now. I'll have to see. I bought an ounce of blue vervain today just in case. If I don't use it for the muscle salve, I know I will definitely find other uses for it.