Cooling Herbs for Summer
- Colorado Farm to Table
- Jul 23
- 3 min read
by Jillian Way
As farmers, herbalists, gardeners, fermenters, preservers, and medicine makers, summer means we are busy. Everyone is in bloom - plants and animals alike. The landscape bursts forth with color and activity. It is an exciting time, but the heat can be daunting. Fortunately, Nature always knows what we need and provides us with an abundance of herbs with cooling properties that peak during summer.
Using herbs and foods to cool our bodies is often free, simple, tasty, and effective. Diaphoretic herbs like yarrow, cayenne pepper, and elder flower induce sweating by stimulating the pores in the skin to open so heat can be released. Demulcent herbs like marshmallow, hibiscus, purslane, and comfrey ward off dehydration and moisten mucus membranes throughout the body. Astringent herbs like rose, red raspberry, and linden tighten and tone tissues, helping tissues preserve water.
One way to determine if an herb cools is by its flavor – many of them have a sour taste. If you’ve ever chewed on the succulent leaves of purslane, you’ll remember the sour taste. Food is also a useful tool for cooling – seasonal foods like berries, watermelon, cucumber, and green salads keep the body cool and hydrated with their high water content.
The degree of cooling provided by an herb depends on how cold energies manifest in the body. Cooling herbs are classified into 4 degrees – an herb or food that is cooling in the 1st degree (lettuce, cucumber, peach, lemon) is considered refreshing and is helpful when heat has not yet settled in the body like when you feel an environmental heat on a sunny day.
An herb or food that is cooling in the 2nd degree such as elder, lemon balm, hibiscus, and rose is considered an anti-inflammatory or refrigerant. These herbs are choice remedies for heat manifesting internally as inflammation or fever or as in cases of emotional stress, irritability, and anger.
An herb or food that is cooling in the 3rd degree is used for more severe manifestations of heat – herbs like lavender, yarrow, California poppy – to reduce perspiration or to astringe (tighten and tone) tissues to slow fluid loss. Finally, herbs and foods that are cooling in the 4th degree are considered anodynes and usually affect consciousness. These are used only in extreme circumstances – for example, opium is considered cooling in the 4th degree. And we all know that that is not a daily tonic herb.
Many of these herbs do better in a cold infusion rather than turning them into a hot tea. Marshmallow root, for example, is full of mucopolysaccharides - chains of sticky sugars that create a mucilage in the plant - which are destroyed by heat. To use marshmallow to your cooling benefit, it should be steeped overnight in the fridge in cold water, then strained through a cheesecloth or muslin so you can really squeeze the mucilage out. You can then ingest that mucilage (add things like soda water, fruit, lemon balm, etc) or apply it topically to a burn or dermatitis. Pour it into a cool bath for angry skin conditions or simply to cool off!
It always amazes me how Nature gives us what we need just when we need it. Use the link below for 5 recipes for when you’ve had too much sun and to cool down with an herbal berry mocktail.
Savor in summer, my friends, for the Wheel of the Year never stops turning.
“O, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
and give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest;
Keep us here - all simply in the springing of the year…
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees are heard…
For this is love and nothing else is love.”
Robert Frost