Remedial plants under threat from EU directive

ANOTHER LIFE:WREATHED SO often in mists and drizzle this summer, the moister waysides of the west are billowing with creamy meadowsweet, the soporific strewing herb of medieval bedrooms (anything to soften the pong from the privy).

Like willow, it is rich in salicylic compounds, the herbal fount of aspirin. Once, in the feverish throes of a summer flu, I bade the kitchen maid prepare a draught of meadowsweet tea. The fever broken, and blinking through the sweat, I recognised the maid to be my own dear wife, Ethna.

The trouble with such self-medication is its guesswork, and one sees the point of regulating commercial herbal remedies for quality and safety. We are regular customers of the botanical shelves in shops that sell the right, unadulterated flour for our bread and have hitherto trusted the Swiss, among others in Europe, in their distillations of remedial herbs.

We wait to see which of the familiar potions on our kitchen-shelf pharmacy will survive the EU Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products, whose transitional grace for existing products expired at the end of April. Those left unregistered with the Irish Medicines Board, and unauthorised for sale, are already beginning to disappear from health food shops, robbed of their freelance existence as “food supplements”.

The board has published two draft lists of herbal substances which may, and may not, be acceptable for inclusion in food supplements. Of those so far approved, most are ordinary vegetables, fruits and spices, together with herbs from the wayside (burdock, yarrow, hawthorn, goldenrod, agrimony and so on) that have survived pharmaceutical reports and for which no specific medicinal claim is made on the packaging.

The list of herbs not permitted as “supplements” include obvious poisons, such as deadly nightshade, and other plants containing toxic alkaloids. But here also are herbs excluded simply because their action is pharmaceutical and thus, like any synthetic medicine, will have side-effects, some of which, in some instances, may prove severe or harmful in the long term.

Rather than entrust the user with the same contraindications and warnings that come with any sheet of synthesised drugs, some herbal preparations have been abruptly curtailed. It is concerning to find that, along with echinacea, the cultivated coneflower thousands have recruited to the benefit of their immune system, and St John’s wort, that has relieved a legion of the mildly depressed, I find listed my own blessed herb serenoa repens, or saw palmetto.

This berry of a spiky palm that grows in sub-tropical America has, for some dozen years or more, subdued the efforts of my prostate gland to strangle my urethra, an affliction common to most ageing men and prompting frequent night-time trips to the loo.

Having found one prescribed drug too draining of energy, I discovered saw palmetto as a regular over-the-counter herbal remedy in Germany, and one that authoritative studies in America have judged to be perfectly safe for most men.

Saw palmetto and its herbal kin now have a home in the chemist’s shop in town. As a practising pharmacist when medicine’s debt to plant life was still readily on view, Ethna can only approve (her venerable mortar and pestle now grinds coriander in the kitchen). But the EU directive can only regulate single herbs, while safe and successful blends evolved from generations of professional herbalism will be denied. The EU’s insatiable drive for standardisation and control will mean, as herbalists argue, fewer, more costly, single herbs and a narrower spectrum of remedies.

Botany is no longer taught to medical students, but its links to drug discovery and development are still as strong as ever. It’s simply that, rather than using the plants themselves when they offer novel chemicals, drug companies find ways of reproducing them synthetically on an industrial scale.

TCD’s Dr Hazel Proctor explains this in her fascinating guide to Trinity’s new Physic Garden, planted (behind the O’Reilly Building) to celebrate the college’s 300 years of botany. The first botany professor, Henry Nicholson, catalogued almost 400 plants with promise of medicinal qualities. The new garden has more than 70, many of them still in use as herbal remedies, and others that are still under current research.

Almost 20, as it happens, are flourishing within our own acre, a few already tried to our benefit (comfrey root for bruises, yarrow tea for rheumatism, valerian for sleep) and others we’d never considered – guelder rose to prompt the immune system, sage for an ageing memory, angelica as a general feel-good tonic.

The old cottage of healer Biddy Early, in Co Clare, is to be rescued again from the nettles: how many little blue bottles she’d have filled from stuff picked down our garden path. . .

Herbal remedies are already beginning to disappear from health food shops, robbed of their freelance existence as ‘food supplements’

Eye on nature

Walking in the Slieve Bloom mountains recently I came across a ball of hair, about the size of my fist, containing some small bones.

Michael Connelly, Ballina, Co Tipperary

It was the regurgitation of a grey crow or raven.

I trod on a snail in the dark. Next night I noticed that the corpse was surrounded by slugs. Were they nibbling?

Tom Honey, Belfast

Slugs are cannibalistic. Go to YouTube and you’ll see the gruesome evidence.

While walking on Narin Strand, Portnoo, Co Donegal, after north westerly gales I found what appears to be a large coconut. It had obviously been in the water for some time given the shells attached. Where might it have originated from?

Peter Blair, Bangor, Co Down

Coconuts are washed in regularly on the west coast on currents from the tropics.

We found a light green butterfly in the garden. It was weak and its wings were almost transparent.

Claire McLaughlin, Abbeyknockmoy, Co Galway

It was the large emerald moth which flies from June to August. After a few days the green fades and disappears when it dies.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. Email: viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address