Fearn The Alder - food & remedies

part of Spring Prompt 3, from one of 20 modules of 'Ogham Prompts'

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Food & Remedies

Nothing on Alder trees is suitable as human food, but the healing potential is incredible, but needs a lot of caution and awareness.

Some traditional families do keep some dried Alder bark in their remedy supplies.

With direction from a professional herbalist material from the Alder tree could be very useful, and quite powerful for releasing toxins. Alder is a very safe tree to handle though.

With caution, Alder can be excellent first aid during the rapid onset of infection. It can move the infection through and out of our body quite quickly, but expect some discomfort while consuming.

Best part of alder for this is the new leafing buds in Spring. At any other time of the year use well diluted bark.

Blackfeet Indians used an infusion made from the bark of red alder to treat lymphatic disorders, and I have heard of herbalists using the long catkins for that.

Internally, Alder is not pleasant at all, and if consumed could be quite an aggressive laxative and diuretic if consumed too much. Try to go for less aggressive laxatives and diuretics if you need them. 

The best therapy use of Alder is the bark, or poulticed leaves, used as first aid to stop bleeding after an accident. Some people do get itchy when alder is used for that first aid, so be aware of that. Having said that, a dilution of alder leaves and bark in a bath to bath in can be excellent relief to irritating skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis. So try out a bath if you have those conditions to see how it works. It could be as good or even better than a seaweed bath. Alder baths are also used by some people to aid getting rid of lice and crabs. Also can ease foot fungal problems.

There is an ancient cottage remedy of using stored very dry bark in liquid as an emergency food poison stomach remedy. But using that remedy is quite risky as the remedy can also make symptoms worse and increase vomiting, and increase its laxative properties. The effects are similar to the current nasty winter stomach bugs, so that Alder combination, if consumed, could cause serious and dangerous weakness.

So it is best to use Alder as remedies guided by a very skilled herbalist, or if used for personal first aid, keep the Alder liquid well diluted. Making an Alder tincture and keeping consumption down to two drops at a time is a way around the consuming challenges

One Alder remedy, that I think is mainly folklore, and I have never tried myself, is placing Alder leaves in shoes at the start of a long walk, jog, run, or cycle ride. The Alder leaves are said to keep feet cool, and prevent swelling. What I have tried, that works well, is soak feet in Alder water during the evening, and following morning, before intending to walk outside bare footed. The Alder strengthens the skin of our feet to be more like shoes. You could create Alder balms for this purpose too.

One other effective Alder use is to use Alder tea as a gargle or mouthwash without swallowing it. This is quite an effective infection protection and a lovely relief from mouth ulcers. Big pharma is currently doing a lot of recent R&D on Alder materials to explore its potent anti-viral properties.

To round this up, the incredible environmental repair properties of Alder trees is mirrored though its potential for our own health repair, especially immune system repair and building, but this needs to be done with extreme caution as the side effects could be a bit of torture.

Following shortly is Part 6, using Alder for divination and prompts

All of my 20 Ogham Prompts are now linked up for easy reference in one place … gazetteer