Alright, it's about the end of August, and we're here looking at warm wood.
So this has been flowering for a while now.
Looks like it's getting on towards doing some dying back a bit,
sometimes things do after the flower, but we can still see the little tiny blooms up here, so this is an Artemisia.
It's reminiscent a of different Artemisias with the finely dissected sort of sick.
That's typical of quite a of Artemisias, although certainly not all of them.
This one is Artemisia absintheum.
Absintheum means without sweetness.
So this is a very bitter herb.
And as such, it's a digestive study.
stimulant, stimulates the digestion, liver, some nervous system.
So that's one of its big uses as a digestive tonic and it also is useful for worms,
specifically round worms, expelling round worms, and as such any of these herbs that are for worms.
worms are obviously have some toxicity so you don't want to use wormwood for a protracted period of time at all.
Just use it when you need it.
Actually the name wormwood does not refer to its expelling worms as I just learned but it comes from the old germin.
word vermut which means preserver of the mind which is a little bit
ironic because actually this herb in its alcohol form which is called absinthe was banned
for quite a while because people thought it was destroying people's minds In fact,
so the drink absent was invented by Henry Peronod in about 1797,
especially with French soldiers returning from the foreign legion,
where apparently they drank a lot of it, thinking that it helped with parasites in the tropics, I suppose.
And then it really caught on with the sort of Bohemian artistic class and the big name.
Everybody remembers this Toulouse-Lutrec, who did all these very well-known posters of Parisian, high-life nightclubs, dancing, so on, and early 19th century.
And so this became very popular with that group of people.
And was apparently somewhat addictive.
And idea was that it was destroying people's liver and really messing up their brains and so it was gradually banned starting about
1910 until 20 years ago there was only, I think, one country in Europe.
Maybe let's check with Slovakia where you could actually buy absinthe.
True absinthe, meaning absinthe.
that contain thu-jung, which is the active ingredient, or the psychoactive ingredient in this wormwood is a compound called thu-jung.
So it's kind of controversial.
It appears in other herbs like thu-jung, for example, which is what it's named for.
just how psychoactive it is or just how dangerous it is.
Recently it has been re-legalized in most countries in Europe and now you can buy absinthe,
which I believe is actually made with his herb and would So that's all happened just in the last little while,
but that's just the side aspect of this plant.
So if you wanted to make this psychoactive absence, you would want to distill out and get the essential oil called Thugone from this.
That is a garden plant, it's quite easy to grow.
It's a kind of a sub shrub, as you can see, not really woody.
It can be grown from seeds,
like a period of cold, like a full sun, well-drained, possibly slightly alkaline situation, but nothing here is alkaline and it's growing just fine.
You just have it on this little raised bank, as you can see, can be divided as well.
So that's Wormwood, Artemisia Epson to you.
Thanks for Thanks for watching!
