Elecampane is a beautiful, towering medicinal plant. This plant can easily be planted for its looks as well as its herbal powers. Pretty yellow flowers with unusually narrow petals. It’s a great addition to any herb garden or tended wildcrafting site.
Its deep, substantial taproot is generally harvested for medicinal use, however flowers are also used. Roots are typically harvested when the plant is three or more years old.
It has a long standing use as an aid in relieving irritating coughs, especially in children. It has a complex action which displays the wisdom of herbal plants as medicines, see any of the David Hoffman books for more info as well as the 7Song herbal database.
Growth Parameters:
Expect an herbaceous perennial to about five feet tall with deep taproots. It self seeds well so let flowers go to seed to allow populations to grow. Some report the plant becoming weedy, so consider your context while establishing.
Strategies for Medicinal Herbaceous Perennials
Planting herbaceous perennials for medicinal use, in our view, should be done with the intention of creating a stable plant population somewhere you can access and tend to the plants which you can then essentially wildcraft from.
How stable / widespread a population needs to be depends on which type of plant part is used medicinally
Aerial parts (stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, bark): you don’t need as many established plants if you are harvesting ariels parts, as generally these parts will grow back from the roots (or remaining plant in the case of bark) Roots: if the medicinal part of the plant is the root, then you are generally eliminating that plant from the population when it is harvested for medicinal use. To keep populations stable, more plants are required.
Plant with the intention of first establishing a stable population which can either 1) provide seeds for you to collect and grow 2) self seed 3) spread by roots or 4) some combination of those three.
