Name: Meadow cornflower – meadow cornflower
Meadow cornflower (Centaurea jacea); family of Asteraceae, or Compositae; meadow cornflower
At a glance, the similarity of this plant with cornflower blue is not obvious. But if you look more closely, you can find many common features.
Meadow cornflower is a plant with a rough branched ribbed-grooved stem 30-80 cm tall. The leaves are lanceolate or elliptic-lanceolate, entire or peristolobate. The flowers are crimson-lilac, in single baskets at the ends of the stem and branches. The wrapper is 10-15 cm wide. The appendages of the wrapper leaves are light brown, membranous, “scaly”. The plant blooms from June to September. The fruit is an achene. A common inhabitant of the middle zone of Russia, it grows in meadows, forest edges, forest glades, among shrubs, in the southern part it occurs less often. In Ukraine, it grows throughout the territory in similar places. Sometimes you can come across a variety of this cornflower with unusual flowers: the extreme ones are white, and the middle ones are red.
The plant has medicinal properties, however, unlike cornflower blue, it is used in slightly different cases and only in folk medicine. They use grass or separate flower baskets, which are harvested during the flowering period.
The plant contains tannins, xanthoglycoside centaurin; in the leaves – up to 120 mg% of ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
Cornflower preparations have choleretic, diuretic, anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties. Herbal infusion is recommended by folk healers for heart ailments, headaches and stomachaches, jaundice, dropsy, and delayed menstruation. An infusion of flower baskets is used externally for rheumatism. Useful baths with this infusion for bathing children with diathesis (jaundice); it is used to wash the skin with eczema. The steamed herb is applied to pain points on the body, with muscle and tendon sprains.
As a honey-bearing plant, cornflower meadow is more generous than its blue sister. Honey productivity reaches 240 kg from 1 hectare of thickets. The honey is pleasant to the taste and of quite high quality.
Herbal infusion. 2 teaspoons of raw materials per 200 ml of boiling water, infuse for 2 hours, filter. Take 1 tablespoon 3-4 times a day.
Poultices from grass (external). Fresh grass is poured with boiling water, wrapped in gauze and applied to the affected areas, kept until it dries. The procedure is repeated several times a day.