The new flower I saw yesterday was Mountain Mint. I’ll try to get another picture when it blooms. Deer and rabbits don’t like the plant but bees do.
The yellow bloom is Bitterweed. It belongs to the sunflower family and bees love the flower. Bitterweed gets its name from its taste caused by a substance making milk bitter if cows graze on it. I can still recall the taste. It’s horrible. Natives and early pioneers called this Sneezeweed. They dried and powdered the leaves and yellow flowers and made a snuff. When inhaled, the snuff would induce sneezing. The sneezing helped clear nasal passages. Natives thought it expelled evil spirits with the sneeze. The snuff was a substitute for tobacco snuff. Many Pioneer women used snuff. The honey produced from bitterweeds tastes robust but very delicious.
2 comments:
The Sneezeweed is very interesting and the foliage is ferny looking:)
I think it's very clever what people did in the olden days to deal with problems. They were great problem solvers. I wonder if that talent is diminishing due to our reliance on technology.
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