Meadowsweet

A mead herb

Hi, welcome to Foraged & Fermented. I’m going to be writing about food in general here, but mostly it will be stuff that I either forage or ferment or both. Sometimes I will be writing about stuff that I grow, although this year has been shockingly bad for growing things (for me at least). This weeks post is a mini-monograph on something I forage, ferment, and grow at my allotment. It is also one of my favourite smelling plants of all time.

Meadowsweet aka Filipendula ulmaria.

That photo, taken on Walthamstow marshes in July 2021, captures how I think of Meadowsweet. As something always bathed in golden light.

Smell and taste - The leaves smell like a mix of cucumber and antiseptic (think TCP or germolene), but the flowers smell heavenly, like marzipan with undertones of honey, hay, and vanilla. Both are edible and taste like they smell, but I much prefer the taste of the flowers.

You’re probably going to want to know how to use it before I get into anything else -

• turn it into mead, wine or beer - I’ll expand on this further down.

• drink it as a tea - I put flowers in my cafetiere, sometimes adding some rose petals and linden blossom too, and cover in boiling water and then leave for about 15 minutes. The recommended amount to use is 1 tsp of dried meadowsweet per mug of boiling water. Drying meadowsweet takes about 12 hours at 42 degrees celsius (the temperature Lucy Jones recommends dehydrating it at in her book Self-sufficient herbalism)

• make it into ice cream - One of the best ice creams I ever made (I forgot to write the recipe down, sorry) was honeysuckle and meadowsweet. I served it with stewed bilberries.

• infuse in oil to make a balm - I infused some almond oil with St John’s wort flowers and meadowsweet and left for a few weeks before straining out and turning into a balm. This was a massive help when I had post-herpetic neuralgia from shingles. I should add my pain was super mild, and I would have used OTC or prescribed medication if the pain had been worse.

• make a flavour powder with it - I dehydrated meadowsweet, strawberries, bilberries (bilberries again! If you’re not familiar, they are related to blueberries but taste a little more sour and delicious, to me. I love pairing them with meadowsweet) and then put them in the spice grinder on the food processor. You can use it with yoghurt or overnight oats.

• Use it as a replacement for elderflower in any recipe you can find with elderflower in (there are loads more elderflower recipes in the world than there are meadowsweet ones).

• Foragerchef aka Alan Bergo has a recipe for wild blueberry-hazelnut cake with meadowsweet cream, Eatweeds aka Robin Harford (who is on Substack) makes a sorbet with it, and Monica Wilde (also on Substack) makes a cordial with it. My friend Mark McCabe used it in pastilles at The Ethicurean, Magnus Nillson served meadowsweet candy at Faviken, and the chefs at Noma served it with waffles, cloudberries, and cream.

• Weave the flowers into a garland and wear it on your head.

• Just stop and smell them and appreciate them.

A quick note on foraging - Don’t eat anything you forage unless you’re 100% confident with your identification - Use multiple sources, don’t rely only on an app or a stranger on the internet (that includes me, obviously). Harvest respectfully - to me that means respecting the plant (I take an offering, ask permission, and say thank you but you do what feels right for you), the land it grows on, and the other creatures that might want to eat it.

Some general botany business - In the Rosaceae family, along with roses, hawthorn, apples, almonds, and lots more. Flowers from June to August, and can be found in marshes, meadows, riversides, ditches, and moist woodlands across Europe and into Asia but it also growing as an introduced plant in parts of North America. Has dense clusters of frothy, sweet-scented flowers at the top of tall, reddish stems.  Leaves are serrated with silvery undersides. Wildfooduk have a good guide to identifying it here.

Meadowsweet leaves

Meadowsweet in bud. Photo taken yesterday on the isle of Mull, Scotland

Colloquial and historical names - Blackin-Girse, Bridewort, Courtship and Matrimony, Dollof, Meadwort, Medewurte, Meadsweet, Queen of the meadow.

History - Meadowsweet was said to be one of the three herbs most sacred to the druids, along with water-mint (Mentha aquatica) and vervain (Verbena officinalis).¹

Beakers and other vessels containing evidence of meadowsweet drinks have been found accompanying human remains at Bronze Age burial sites across Scotland, as well as in Denmark, Germany, and Austria.

In the Middle Ages and beyond Meadowsweet was employed as a strewing herb. Strewing herbs were like potpourri for the floor, but often with the added benefit of keeping bugs away. The 16th century herbalist John Gerard wrote that it exceeded all other strewing herbs for houses, chambers, halls and banqueting houses “for the smell thereof makes the heart merrie” and “delighteth the senses”.²

The ‘spir’ in Aspirin comes from meadowsweet’s older binomial name - Spirea ulmaria. This is because meadowsweet was one of the plant materials, willow bark and oil of wintergreen being two others, that salicylic acid was first extracted from. In 1897 Felix Hoffman added an acetyl group to salicylic acid and made Acetylsalicyclic, this was then patented by the Bayer company and sold as Aspirin.

Medicinal actions and properties - Analgesic, aromatic, astringent, antiarthritic, anti-inflammatory, anti-rheumatic, diuretic, and diaphoretic.

Traditional uses around the world -

• In the Samogita region of Lithuania the flowers of meadowsweet are used in tea and tincture form for treating colds, fevers, urinary tract infections, and kidney disease.³

• An infusion of the aerial parts of meadowsweet is said to be good for the heart in North West Russia, where an infusion of the flowers is also recommended for kidney stones.⁴

• In Bosnia and Herzegovina meadowsweet tinctures, infusions, and syrups are all used to help treat rheumatism. ⁵

• It’s fed to arthritic horses in British Columbia, Canada to help ease their pain.⁶

• On the isle of Lewis meadowsweet used to be combined with eyebright to treat insomnia.⁷

• In England, herbalist Julie Bruton-Seale recommends meadowsweet tea for indigestion, heartburn, gastritis, stomach ulcers, arthritis and rheumatism. ⁸

Cautions - It favours the same habitat as a deadly poisonous plant, Hemlock water dropwort. They both have white flowers but beyond that I don’t think you’re in any danger of confusing the two, you should however be careful not to let bits of the plant fall or blow into your foraging basket/tupperware/bag. Before foraging it’s important to familiarise yourself with the poisonous plants and fungi that grow where you go too.

Because of the salicylic acid, you shouldn’t ingest meadowsweet if you have an aspirin allergy. It should also be avoided if you’re on blood thinning medication, due to a heparin-like anticoagulant found in the flowers⁹.

Clinical studies - Helicobacter pylori is a bacteria that lives in the stomach, and though it isn’t known to cause any problems for most people who have it, 15% of people with it develop ulcers in the stomach or duodenum, it’s also been classified by the WHO as a class 1 carcinogen. A 2009 study found that meadowsweet has anti-Helicobacter effects, but advised it could only be seen as an adjunct treatment alongside marketed antibiotics, which have a higher efficacy rate.¹⁰ The herbalist RJ Whelan has a PDF with a list of different clinical studies on meadowsweet that you can read here.

Booze - If you’ve read anything about meadowsweet before you will have read two things; one is that Elizabeth the 1st loved it (I’m not writing about that because I don’t care about what royals like or liked) and the other is that it’s a herb for mead. Some of its old names, such as meadwort and meadsweet, allude to its use as a mead herb but it’s thought that even its present common name derives from mead rather than meadow.

One of the Bronze age beakers I mentioned in the history section was found in Caithness, Scotland next to the remains of a woman who lived and died over 4000 years ago. Residue in the beaker was analysed and found to contain traces of meadowsweet, wood sage, bramble, birch sap, alder sap, honey and a mixture of barley and oats. Nowadays if we made a drink with those ingredients we’d call it a Braggot - a hybrid of mead and beer. It would have been brewed with wild yeast, which is abundant in raw honey and on meadowsweet, so most likely wouldn’t have been stronger than 5 or 6% ABV. You can read more about ancient meadowsweet booze on the excellent blog by archeologist Merryn Dinely and her brewer husband Graham.

I’ve experimented a bit with meadowsweet meads and the two best ones I have made were a sparkling one, and a bilberry one that I added a little meadowsweet to. The sparkling one I made just like an elderflower “champagne” but swapped out the elderflower for meadowsweet and the sugar for honey. I didn’t use commercial yeast because I had made a wild yeast starter with meadowsweet. I made the wild yeast starter by putting 20g of honey and 80ml of spring water with some meadowsweet in a jar and leaving it for about 3 days, this is a Pascal Baudur method. Here is a recipe for elderflower “champagne”. I wrote the recipe down for the bilberry mead in my phones notes app and then my phone broke and I didn’t back up my notes, don’t write recipes in your phones notes app or if you do back things up. It was the best mead I’ve ever made and the best I’ve ever tasted, and if I’d been patient enough to let it age I imagine it would have only got better.

My bilberry and meadowsweet mead

I made a mead inspired by the Bronze age braggot, and didn’t enjoy the mouthfeel at all, there was a weird oiliness to it. I didn’t use any of the grains or alder sap but did use bramble shoots, wood sage, and birch sap in addition to the meadowsweet and honey.

You can also make kombucha, kefir, wine or ale (a gruit really) with meadowsweet, and Scotland’s Cairn O’Mohr make a cider flavoured with it. Anything you make into a mead, wine, or ale you can make into a vinegar, it just needs access to some oxygen. Read Sandor Katz explaining how to do that here. I set aside a little of any mead or wine I make for vinegar, and I use it in cooking and salad dressings but mostly I love adding it to fizzy water for a refreshing (and tooth enamel destroying) drink.

Value to wildlife - The larvae of several moth species, including Emperor, Brown Spot Pinion, Grey pug, Hebrew Character, Lime-speck Pug, Mottled Beauty, Lesser Cream Wave, and Satellite, use it as a food plant. The flowers also attract a wide variety of other insects, including pollinators such as bees, butterflies and hoverflies, whilst the seeds provide food for birds.

Folklore and mythology -

• Bloeduwedd - There is a character in Welsh mythology called Lleu Llaw Gyffes who was cursed by his mother to never have a human wife. The magicians Math and Gywdion made a wife for Lleu from the flowers of broom, oak and meadowsweet. She was named "Blodeuwedd", which means "flower-faced" in Middle Welsh. She was later turned into an owl.

• Cu Chulain - A Gaelic name for meadowsweet is 'Cneas Chu Chullain' - the belt of Cu Chulainn. One of the explanations for this name is that the mythological figure Cu Chulainn wrapped meadowsweet around his waist when he was suffering from shingles to help treat it, another is that the plant calmed him down when he was in a frenzied state

• Kudyrash - In Russian folklore there is a tale of a knight called Kudryash, who got over his fear of death by wearing a meadowsweet garland that a river nymph gave to him for protection.

A final word, on meadowsweet and death -

Ah! but in early spring, cull meadowsweet,

Neighbour, and weave a garland for my tomb

 Leonidas of Tarentum, 3rd century BCE.

I wrote before about meadowsweet being found in vessels in burial sites, it crops up in the Russian folk story to help a knight get over his fear of death, and it’s here in this ancient poem (The Tomb of Crethon) as something to place on a tomb. I wonder if it was used as a grief support herb, like rose and motherwort, or if it was seen as something valuable to take with you to the afterlife. I would love to know if anyone else knows of any connections between meadowsweet and death.

1. Grieve, M. (1998). A modern herbal : the medicinal, culinary, cosmetic and economic properties, cultivation and folklore of herbs, grasses, fungi, shrubs and trees with all their modern scientific uses. London England: Tiger Books International.

2. Gerard, J. (1597). The herball; or, General historie of plantes. London, J. Norton.

3. Pranskuniene, Z., Dauliute, R., Pranskunas, A. and Bernatoniene, J. (2018). Ethnopharmaceutical knowledge in Samogitia region of Lithuania: where old traditions overlap with modern medicine. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 14(1). doi:10.1186/s13002-018-0268-x.

4. Belichenko, O., Kolosova, V., Kalle, R. and Sõukand, R. (2022). Green pharmacy at the tips of your toes: medicinal plants used by Setos and Russians of Pechorsky District, Pskov Oblast (NW Russia). Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 18(1). doi:10.1186/s13002-022-00540-w.

5. Redzić, S.S. (2007). The ecological aspect of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology of population in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Collegium Antropologicum, [online] 31(3), pp.869–890. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18041402/.

6. Lans, C., Turner, N., Brauer, G. et al. Ethnoveterinary medicines used for horses in Trinidad and in British Columbia, Canada. J Ethnobiology Ethnomedicine 2, 31 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-2-31

7. Hatfield, G. (2007). Hatfield’s Herbal: The Curious Stories of Britain’s Wild Plants. Penguin.

8. Bruton-Seal, J. and Seal, M. (2008). Hedgerow medicine : harvest and make your own herbal remedies. Ludlow: Merlin Unwin.

9. Kudriashov BA, Liapina LA, Azieva LD. Soderzhanie geparinopodobnogo antikoagulianta v tsvetkakh tavolgi viazolistnoĭ [The content of a heparin-like anticoagulant in the flowers of the meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria)]. Farmakol Toksikol. 1990 Jul-Aug;53(4):39-41. Russian. PMID: 2226759.

10. Cwikla, C., Schmidt, K., Matthias, A., Bone, K.M., Lehmann, R. and Tiralongo, E. (2009). Investigations into the antibacterial activities of phytotherapeutics against Helicobacter pylori and Campylobacter jejuni. Phytotherapy Research, 24(5), pp.649–656. doi:10.1002/ptr.2933.