Jewelweed

Today I have an odd plant for you that many of you have probably seen out and about but have never given a second thought to: jewelweed (also called “touch-me-not”).

It may its name from the hydrophobic leaves where rain and dew tend to collect in little droplets often giving it a bedazzled look. The seeds can also bare a resemblance to a tiny green jewel.

Let’s check out this unusual medicine and explore why you might want it:

Plant Profile:

Scientific Name: Impatiens capensis, Impatiens pallida

Preferred Habitat: Moist shady areas at the edges of forests and near water, riverbanks, near creeks, on the sides of shady pathways

Edible Parts: Shoots, flowers, seed pods

Distribution: Most of North America excluding a few of the United States, Alaska, and some of the northernmost territories.

Harvest Season: Early summer (shoots), Early-late summer (shoots), late summer (seed pods)

Key Identifiers: Yellow or orange orchid-like flowers that are almost an inch from front to back, leaves are alternately arranged and oval-shaped. The plants are around 2-5ft tall and have succulent stems. Stems are hollow (like straws) and fairly fragile.

Toxic Look-Alikes: There are no close resemblances to jewelweed, but it can vaguely resemble other plants in the balsam family. Most balsams have very sharply toothed, long leaves with larger pink or purple flowers.

Nutrition: 

Once again, I could not find much by way of nutrient density, but here are some health benefits:

• Diuretic

• Cathartic

• Emetic

• The tea can help fevers, difficult urination, measles, stomach cramps, and jaundice

• The juices are used mostly topically for skin ailments such as burns, wounds, poison ivy rash, nettle stings, herpes, hemorrhoids, acne, hives, blisters, and bruises

• Can be used as an antidote to fish poisoning

• In Eastern medicine the aerial parts are used to treat swelling and as an antimicrobial

• The seeds have been used to increase blood flow and help with menstruation, post-natal pain, and as an expectorant

• The juices can also be used for athlete’s foot and other fungal ailments

So quite a lot to love from a medicinal perspective!

Culinary Uses

Leaves: Leaves (mainly as young shoots) can be used as a salad green. Much like last week’s plant, wood sorrel, it does contain pretty high levels of oxalic acid so can sometimes cause kidney stone issues if you consume too much.

I recommend using it as a garnish or to spice up a meal when raw rather than making it the main dish.

The exception to this is if you boil the plant! Boiling twice and changing the water will draw out most of the oxalic acid making it better to eat.

Flowers: The same can be said for the flowers, although they make a much prettier garnish!

Stems: The stems along with the rest of the plant can be used to make a salve, balm, soap, or crushed and used as a topical rash dressing as the plant helps significantly with skin ailments and rashes in particular.

Seed pods: The small seed pods are ballistic which makes for a fun but very challenging snack! If moved or touched too much, it will shoot the seeds quite a distance!

What you want to do is try to grab a seed pod by the stem at the top without moving it too much, and then stick it in your mouth before it explodes. This is actually how it gets its nickname “touch-me-not”.

The seeds are also added to salads and taste very much like good walnuts which is a nice snack in the wild!

Growth Habits:

Jewelweed is a fragile plant with shallow roots, so it is very easy to disturb a patch if you just go bumbling through.

It will most often be near the same areas you’d expect to find a lot of mosquitos so do with that information what you will!

Remedy

I wanted to make a separate section about this since the other section was getting too long and this one is very cool:

The very best use for jewelweed in my opinion is as a remedy for poison ivy. To my knowledge any part of the plant can be crushed (you want the juices) and applied to poison ivy as a fast-acting neutralizer to the itching oils from poison ivy. Ironically, they often grow nearby one another!

This remedy actually HAS been studied and proven effective!

The main reason for this is that the particular saponins in jewelweed (the compound that makes soaps sudsy) breaks down the oils of poison ivy and at the same time alleviates itching and rashes.

Because of the saponin content in jewelweed, people often add it to soaps, make it into balms, or turn it into a topical spray along with other herbs that heal the skin (such as plantain, calendula, or chickweed).

Other species in the same genus can be used, but these two are most common and easiest to find in most of North America!

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