The herb that walked around the world - and a plantain & comfrey balm recipe

If there isn’t plantain growing within twenty feet of where you are, I’ll eat my shoe! Broad oval leaves flat to the ground, deep parallel ribs, a rat's-tail flower spike: it grows in the cracks of paths, in the gateway of a field, in the compacted ground by a bench. It holds close to the ground, and of all the herbs it may have the strongest folk reputation for resilience. It is a totally extraordinary plant.

Where I used to live, I made a regular appointment with a wonderful Thai massage therapist for the sort of ‘takes no prisoners’ massage Thailand is famous for. It used to astonish me that I could still walk afterwards; but even more amazingly, however painful the experience was, I never had any bruises. What’s more, despite the stress she put on her own body in going through several of these workouts every day, even her hands were healthy and pain-free.

A Thai healer's plantain balm

My therapist’s secret was the homemade balm she generously covered her clients with from head to toe to help with healing afterwards. She comes from a family of healers in the north-east of Thailand. In Isaan that’s not unusual: healing knowledge traditionally passes down through families rather than schools, and children learn by walking out to gather remedies with their parents and grandparents. A national survey once counted around 27,760 traditional healers in Thailand, and more than half of them were in that one region.

Her balm worked wonders, and the main ingredient was plantain.

Many traditions, one plant

I had always thought of plantain as ours. It's in the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm, where it's called waybread and addressed directly as the mother of herbs, the one that opened herself to chariots and to grief and survived both. It’s a very characteristic part of UK flora. What was it doing in a Thai balm for bruises and sore joints?

Well, as it happens, Plantago major is the only plantain native to Thailand and it is common throughout the country. One of its Thai names is หญ้าเอ็นยืด, ya en yuet, which translates roughly as ‘tendon-stretching grass’. They didn't borrow the idea from us - they watched the plant, and the plant told them the same thing it told us.

And not only there, either. The Ojibwe of the Great Lakes soaked plantain leaves in warm water and bound them onto sprains, bruises, burns and bee stings. In Chinese medicine, plantain seed is used for swollen joints and sprains. Three traditions, separated by oceans, arriving independently at the same plant for the same kind of injury.

We tend to assume traditional knowledge travelled along trade routes. Sometimes it did. But plantain grew locally almost everywhere across Eurasia already, so nobody needed to be told. A visibly slippery, astringent leaf that takes the sting out of a wound is exactly the sort of thing an observant person works out for themselves, and then their neighbour works out, and then someone on the other side of the world works out, entirely separately. Poultices in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. Dioscorides and Pliny in the first century. The Charaka Samhita in India. The Shennong Bencao Jing in China.

However, plantain has another name ...

Englishman's foot: plantain and colonisation

First Nation Americans called it ‘Englishman's foot’, or ‘white man's footprint’. Plantain is native to Eurasia, but it went to the Americas, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand in the seams of European clothing and the hooves of European livestock and on the shoes of white colonisers. Each plant makes around twenty thousand seeds. It thrives in compacted soil, which means it flourished exactly where boots had been. Native peoples noticed it springing up in the literal footprints of the newcomers and they named it for what it announced.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this in Braiding Sweetgrass. Communities were wary of the plant at first, for obvious reasons. But over generations they came to know it, use it, and fold it into their own medicine. Her word for what plantain did is that it naturalised rather than invaded. It became a good neighbour. The same leaf that marked an arrival nobody asked for, in time became a healer that people were glad for. It doesn't undo any of the wrongs done, but it does say something about attention, and about what happens when you look properly at what's under your feet.

A plantain and comfrey balm recipe for aching joints and bruises

This is not my therapist's plantain balm recipe! Hers belongs to her family and I wouldn't presume. This is the standard Western herbalist method, built to do a similar job, and it's the version I make:

You will need:

• Dried plantain leaf - 360 ml by volume, chopped and firmly packed (roughly a good double handful). Dried leaf is so light that weighing it isn't much help, so measure it in a jug.

• Dried comfrey leaf - the same again, 360 ml.

• Coconut oil - 300 ml, which is about 275 g.

• Beeswax - 25 g, grated or pellets.

Method:

Melt the coconut oil and add the dried leaves. Either keep it in a slow cooker on its lowest setting for three hours, or put it in a lidded jar in a warm place for four to six weeks. Strain through muslin, pressing hard to get all the oil out. Reheat gently, stir in the grated beeswax until it dissolves, pour into tins, and leave to set for half an hour before putting the lids on.

Coconut oil is already firm at room temperature, so it needs less beeswax than an olive oil balm would. The comfrey is there for the joints and bruises specifically: it contains allantoin, which has a long and well-earned reputation for exactly this.

Take care to gather plantain away from roadsides, field edges that get sprayed, and anywhere dogs walk.

Comfrey is for unbroken skin only. Don't put it on an open wound, because it closes the surface fast and can seal in what should have come out. Don't take it internally, and leave it out altogether if you're pregnant or breastfeeding, in which case a plain plantain balm is still excellent.

Patch test on your inner arm and wait a day, as with anything new.

This is a balm for ordinary aches, and the usual advice is see a doctor for anything you’re worried about.

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That's more than enough from me!