News for May 2026!
What happened in May 2026 at Phyto-info... we tell you everything!
Hello everyone 🌿
This month we let you guess the plant we’ve been working on lately. It is a common plant, so common, that it is often disdained by English lawn lovers. Herbalist Maria Treben tells the story of a mother who refused to treat her son’s acne with this plant on the pretext that people are not treated with “weeds”. Have you guessed already? No? So, we’re following the clues.
It was dedicated on the 26th day of the month of ventôse in the French Republican calendar. Once, its latex was used to make rubber before being dethroned by the hevea. It is even said that during the Second World War, in the Soviet Union, a related species was grown on a large scale for its latex to make the tires of Red Army trucks.
It also played a role in the collective imagination and poetry. The ethnographer Élie Reclus wrote in his collection on plants “this flower which is a sun becomes a milky way, a world of stars, after flowering”. Even the rock world paid tribute to it, with the Rolling Stones fans probably remembering their 1967 song of the same name. You’re probably starting to guess which plant it is. With the clues coming, it is the assured outcome!
It became the emblem of the Éditions Larousse, born from the inspiration of the cartoonist Émile-Auguste Reiber, who depicts a woman blowing on its fruits under the motto “I sow to the four winds”. At the heart of the divinatory tradition, young girls asked it how many years separated them from marriage. As many times as they had to blow, as many years as they had to languish. For a child, blowing on the ripe flower to disperse the fruit according to the wind is, or was, pure pleasure – a practice that seems to be falling into disuse in the screen age.
In addition to being medicinal, it is also edible. Its leaves are eaten in salad or fritters, its flowers are transformed into fortifying wine or honey, while its root serves as a substitute for coffee or tea. However, be careful not to pick it near a pasture area, it would be a shame to grab the lancet liver fluke and kick the bucket sooner than expected.
You already figured it out a while ago, here is the dandelion. You can discover all its benefits and how to use it on our website phyto-info.com.
Our new plant 👏
- Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)
Discover its benefits and precautions for use on our platform.
🌿 🌻 🌾
That’s all for our May update, if you are interested in our search tool, more info on phyto-info.com.
To discover our search tool, head to this page.
And if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us 🤗
Next newsletter in a month! Stay tuned!