Honeysuckle is a medicinal and forage plant with an old tradition, it grows both wild and cultivated. In the wild, the medicinal plant is mainly found on riverbanks or in riparian forests. In private gardens and urban gardens, honeysuckle is often seen, but commercial cultivation in fields hardly takes place.
Occurrence and cultivation of honeysuckle
Growing up to one meter high, honeysuckle is strictly perennial and has thick root systems reminiscent of turnips. The botanical home of honeysuckle is Europe and the entire Asian continent. Even into the 19th century, honeysuckle was often grown commercially, because as an ornamental, forage, and medicinal plant, honeysuckle used to play a far greater role than it does today. The wildness started early, so that the honeysuckle can be found on the banks of rivers and streams, on meadows and increasingly also in riparian forests. The medicinal and useful plant loves strongly loamy and moist soil, which must also be taken into account when growing it in your own garden. Growing up to one meter high, honeysuckle is strictly perennial and has thick root system reminiscent of turnips. The stalks and ridges of honeysuckle sprout from this root in the spring. The leaves are typically pinnate unpaired, alternate on the stems. The individual leaves of the plant can grow up to four centimeters long and remain narrow. Honeysuckle flowers in the summer months, with the flowers standing in candle-like clusters and having a whitish to pinkish coloration.
Effect and application
Honeysuckle belongs to the legume family and, like many others from this plant family, has an asymmetrical shape of the flowers. The seeds of the plant develop from the flowers. In this process, pod-like pods first develop from the flowers, and then the bean-shaped, brownish seeds develop from them. In common parlance, honeysuckle is also known as buckweed, blotchweed, honeysuckle or poxweed. The mode of action and the particularly medicinal effect of honeysuckle are due to the numerous pharmacologically active ingredients. In addition to galegine, galuteolin, bitter substances and phytosterols, the flowers of honeysuckle also contain flavonoids, tannins, saponins and allantoin. In the past, honeysuckle was often grown as a fodder plant for grazing livestock, but today you can hardly find any farmer feeding honeysuckle to his livestock. For a long time it was not known that honeysuckle can also be toxic as fodder, but this toxicity does not apply to all types of livestock. In extreme cases, deaths of livestock have also occurred due to excessive feeding of honeysuckle. This latent toxicity is the main reason why honeysuckle is not used as a forage crop nowadays. If honeysuckle is used in human medicine for medicinal purposes, it is almost exclusively as a tea preparation. The drug can be used fresh or dried. In the case of the dried drug, stored in a cool, dry place, no loss of active ingredient is to be expected. For use, two teaspoons of honeysuckle are poured over a large cup of scalding hot water. The infusion time should be at least ten minutes, so that all relevant active ingredients are contained in the tea brew. After straining, the tea can be drunk in sips; for an adult, up to three cups are allowed daily.
Importance for health, treatment and prevention.
In traditional folk medicine, the effect of honeysuckle is considered undisputed. Honeysuckle promotes milk production and due to the ingredients has antibiotic, diuretic, diaphoretic and blood sugar lowering effects. Other uses include fever and cystitis. Due to the blood sugar lowering effect, honeysuckle tea can be used to support diabetes mellitus, but this should always be done only in consultation with the attending physician. The main significance of the plant results from its milk-forming property, therefore the medicinal plant used to be frequently used for nursing mothers. Honeysuckle tea should be used as a cure. After about 6 weeks, a break of the same length of time should be taken before the drinking cycle starts all over again. The break of several weeks prevents undesirable long-term effects due to latent toxic cell damage.Although the use as a milk-forming tea is hardly done today, the milk-forming effect could also be confirmed by studies. The plant name honeysuckle already indicates the medicinal property of lactation. The Greek words “gala” and “agein” mean milk and drift. The importance for health therefore refers first and foremost to the promotion of milk formation. Especially when milk formation is difficult to get going, drinking honeysuckle tea is often helpful. In the first days after a birth, the increase in the amount of milk is then noticeable. Another special attention concerning importance of honeysuckle for health, prevention and treatment results from its blood sugar lowering effect. This specific property of honeysuckle is the subject of botanical research, and scientists hope that it will lead, among other things, to approaches to the accompanying therapy of diabetes mellitus. However, the blood sugar-lowering effect of honeysuckle has not yet been conclusively confirmed medically, but the botanical study material available to date is promising. Diabetics should therefore consider honeysuckle tea only as a supplement to conventional medical treatment. If the consumption of honeysuckle is combined with other blood sugar-lowering measures such as a balanced diet and physical exercise, high blood sugar levels can be lowered surprisingly well without additional insulin administration.
