Popular names: eye flower, heavenly color, May flower, mask.
Parts Used: Flowers and leaves.
Pharmacy name: daisy flowers – Bellidis flos (formerly: Flores Bellidis), daisy leaves – Bellidis folium (formerly: Folia Bellidis).
Botanical description. This common plant hardly needs a detailed description, as most readers have known it as a flower for weaving wreaths since childhood. Daisy forms a rosette of leaves, from which a short (up to 10 cm) leafless peduncle grows. At its top sits a single basket with white reed flowers (at the edges of the bottom they are traditionally reddish) and yellow tubular in the central part. In sunlight, the baskets open wide, at night and in the rain they close and droop. It blooms from the first spring days until late autumn. Fields, meadows, gardens and roadsides are the favorite habitats of the daisy, which especially gravitates towards clay soils.
Collection and preparation. Daisy can be harvested almost all year round, but the greatest effectiveness is attributed to raw materials collected within June 24 (Ivan Kupala Day), since at this time the development of the plant reaches its climax. Collect both inflorescences and leaves, and then thoroughly dry them in the air.
Active ingredients: saponins, bitterness, tannins, a little essential oil, anthoxanthin and flavonoids.
Healing action and application. Scientific medicine does not recognize the daisy, although it seems to have shown itself to be extremely effective in tea blends that are meant to stimulate the general metabolism.
Application in folk medicine.The daisy was highly valued in the Middle Ages. Leonart Fuchs (1543) writes: “Daisy is extremely good for paralyzed limbs, for gout and hip disease, it also delays the goiter; it generally removes coarse moisture.” A. Lonitser (1564) reports: “For convulsions, boil a daisy in good wine, drink it when you go to bed – it helps. With spots on the body, boil this herb with a root in rainwater, wash the spots with it – they will pass … Daisy heals wounds, cools the liver, extinguishes the heat inside. P. A. Mattiolus and Jerome Bock especially praise its effectiveness in healing wounds. Modern folk medicine uses this medicinal plant to stimulate appetite, as a gastric and choleretic agent, for liver diseases, but above all as a blood purifier.
- Tea from daisy flowers and leaves: pour 2 teaspoons of raw materials into 1/4 liter of boiling water, let stand for 10 minutes, strain. Drink 2 times every day for 1 cup. This tea is also used for compresses on poorly healing wounds or for lotion of skin rashes.
With impure skin, washing with tea from daisy herb and tricolor violet in equal parts, which is prepared by cold extraction, helps.
- Tea from daisy herb and tricolor violet: one teaspoon of daisy herb and tricolor violet herb, pour 1 liter of water at room temperature, leave for 8-10 hours (overnight), then strain.
Side effects are unknown.