News of July 2023!

Hello everyone 🌿

Letting a small corner of the garden live its life attracts lots of weird bugs and new plants that come and settle in by themselves. The newcomer this year, after formal identification, is the silverweed (Potentilla anserina).

There is a bunch of potentillas, rocks, silver, erect, spring, Norwegian, tormentilla, Crantz, English, creeping, sterile, mountain, and many others. It sounds like the words of an old woman song by Pierre Perret, but was talking to him about weirdos… 🎶

Guess what? Silverweed, classified as a “weed”, is medicinal. Although it is only very rarely represented in our reference works, it is still reserved for an entrance ticket in Phyto-info 🥰

Added plants 👏

Here are three plants that you asked us for:

• Borage officinalis (Borago officinalis)
• St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum)
• Small-leaved lime (Tilia cordata)

Keep in mind that borage is now not recommended in modern books because of its content of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which are potentially carcinogenic and toxic to the liver. St. John’s wort, on the other hand, is an excellent plant for many uses, but it is so complicated in terms of drug interactions that it is better to play it safe and be well informed before venturing out. As for linden, the authors are almost all unanimous, it is the sedative plant par excellence.

We have listed thesmall-leaved lime, next month we will publish thelarge-leaved lime andcommon linden. All three have similar characteristics and can generally be used in the same way.

Regarding the addition of plants, we give our members the opportunity to choose the plants to include in our search tool; Feel free to let us know your preferences by email.

You asked us for elderberry, we are working on it!

General 👏 Assembly

The minutes of our general meeting, which took place at the end of June, are now online. Here is a summary of the tasks we set ourselves:

• Implement a search by therapeutic property
• Implement a search by biochemical composition
• Write frequently asked questions (FAQs)
• Translate the site and the search tool into English
• Offer partial free access to the search tool
• Layout old books for quality reprinting

Flyer 👏

Our new flyers have arrived; a big thank you to the merchants who agreed to leave us a small corner of the counter to put down our posters 🙏

Improving our confidence index 👏

When several plants are proposed for a given symptom, classifying them in one way or another seems to be the way to go. In a previous post, we put forward a confidence index… rather primitive.

The confidence index is a way of showing the degree of unanimity among specialists regarding the traditional uses of plants.

While our first calculation was worthy of a kindergarten student, we refined our method somewhat. We now take into account a few more parameters, and even if the calculation of the index is a bit like a gas factory, it seems more accurate, especially in cases where there are poor representations of plants in books. A high index is therefore avoided for a use that has only a few sources.

We explain our way of calculating in this post.

This was the news of our month of July, if our search tool interests you, more information on phyto-info.com.

Discover our Plant Search Tool

And if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us 🤗

Next newsletter in a month! Stay tuned!