Widow's Endorphins: Rainy, Foggy Days

Widow's Endorphins: Rainy, Foggy Days: It's that time of year when Autumn's vibrant colours are set against a backdrop of slick black, smokey greys, and muted greens...

Rainy, Foggy Days

It's that time of year when Autumn's vibrant colours are set against a backdrop of slick black, smokey greys, and muted greens.  Maple leaves, on my walk through Squirrel Alley, as my friend calls it, look like a Japanese print - the rain reviving the bold crimson, orange, amber, yellow and green on the deep black and silver surface of the pathway. 

Bougainvillea against the fog shrouded trees.  The vibrant colour is muted in the low light, allowing the veins of the paper thin flowers to show off.  As the fog dissipates, the vibrant magenta colour becomes bolder.  

The last rose to bloom on my balcony.  A lone Oscar Peterson rosebud, braving a near freezing late October day.  This last rosebud is different from the rest - the piano key white never revealed itself. The last rose is the palest apricot, pink and yellow.  As the curtain draws on the show season, the Oscar Peterson rose takes a quiet bow.

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Widow's Endorphins: Postcard to Heaven

Widow's Endorphins: Postcard to Heaven: Having a wonderful time.  Wish you were here. Photograph Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images ...

Postcard to Heaven

Having a wonderful time.  Wish you were here.

Photograph Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Inc.

Widow's Endorphins: Happy Thanksgiving!

Widow's Endorphins: Happy Thanksgiving!: Giving thanks for life itself...for each breath and heartbeat.  Giving thanks for the love and kindness of family, and friends. Giving...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Giving thanks for life itself...for each breath and heartbeat.  Giving thanks for the love and kindness of family, and friends. Giving thanks for the beauty of nature, and the abundance of our planet.

Photograph Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Widow's Endorphins: Echinacea, It's Nothing to Sneeze At!

Widow's Endorphins: Echinacea, It's Nothing to Sneeze At!: Echinacea is more than just a pretty flower.  It is a recognized immune system booster, first used by the Indigenous people of North A...

Echinacea, It's Nothing to Sneeze At!

Echinacea is more than just a pretty flower.  It is a recognized immune system booster, first used by the Indigenous people of North America for relief from cough and sore throat.  For those of us who use it to prevent colds, we owe a debt of gratitude to two men who met back in the early 1950's.

Before we get to that story, a little about the plant itself...  

Echinacea gets its name from the Greek word, echinos, meaning hedgehog.  The perfect name for this flower!  Echinacea comes in purple, magenta, white, yellow and cream.  Besides the prominent, cone-like, "hedgehog" centres, the flower has petals which point downward.

They may look like a crowd of people with umbrellas, however, these are not rainy day plants. Echinacea is a member of the Sunflower family.  It won't grow in the shade.  Think of the wide Prairies, and plant Echinacea in a spot that gets full sunlight all day.

They're very hardy, and survive year after brutal year of Eastern Canadian Winters.  These drought resistant perennials withstand temperatures from -40C (40 below on the Farenheit scale), to 40C with the humidex (that's 104F)!

The flower, and its roots have been used medicinally by the Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow, Comanche, and other indigenous tribes forever.  It was introduced to European settlers, and in 1737 the plant and its medicinal use was described in John Clayton's Catalogue of Plants, Fruits, and Trees Native to Virginia.    

In 1953, Alfred Vogel, his wife and daughter, travelled from Switzerland to the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA. There, he met an Oglala Lakota Medicine Man, Ben Black Elk, who taught him how to use Echinacea externally for wounds and snake bite, and internally for cough and colds.

Black Elk gave him Echinacea seeds which Vogel took back to Switzerland, and cultivated.  His naturopathic medicines grew out of the time Black Elk spent sharing with him generations of knowledge about the plant.  The A. Vogel company website says, "the plants grown from these seeds were the basis for Alfred Vogel's experiments with Echinacea, which became his most important healing plant".

 

Alfred Vogel died in 1996, at the age of 94.  The statue in the garden museum in Teufen, Switzerland shows him carrying a bouquet of Echinacea.

Ben Black Elk died in 1973, at the age of 74.  His lifelong passion for his Lakota heritage, earned him the title of the "fifth face" on Mount Rushmore.  His father, Nicholas Black Elk is credited with the revival of Indigenous culture, through poet John Neihardt's 1932 book, Black Elk Speaks.

One of Black Elk's descendants lamented that not one penny of the millions made in sales of the book, ever went into scholarships for their people.  As for shared profits from Echinacea sales, I have not found any mention of this either.     

Echinacea has been widely studied.  It has been proven to fight infection by stimulating the cells which heal the body from infection.  Echinacea stimulates phagocytosis, which is what happens when white blood cells and lymphocytes consume invading organisms.

A major warning: Echinacea is so good at stimulating the immune system, that it must be avoided by anyone with an autoimmune disorder, such as Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, or Multiple Sclerosis.

People who have had organ transplants, must take immunosuppressant medication to prevent their bodies from rejecting the new organ, or organs.  Echinacea counteracts that, potentially leading to organ rejection and failure.

Echinacea also has blood thinning properties, and may be harmful to someone taking blood thinners.

I've been taking it for thirty years.  While I have had the occasional history-making cold (headline: Woman Gets Man Cold!), it has kept me cold free year after year (that, and hand washing).

So, thank you to Ben Black Elk for so generously sharing generations of knowledge about the Echinacea plant, and thank you to Alfred Vogel for experiments and product development, so that millions of us can stay healthy through cold season!

Floral Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Inc.