Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium)

It's about the end of August and we're here looking at wormwood. So this has been flowering for a while now. Looks like it's getting on towards doing some dying back a little bit. Sometimes things do after the flower, but we can still see the little tiny blooms up here. So this is an Artemisia. It's reminiscent of a lot of different Artemisias with the finely dissected sort of silvery foliage. That's typical of quite a number of Artemisias, although certainly not all of them. Aster family. This one is Artemisia absinthium. Absinthium means without sweetness. So this is a very bitter herb and as such it's a digestive stimulant. Stimulates the digestion, liver, to some extent nervous system. So that's one of its big uses is as a digestive tonic and it also is useful for worms, specifically roundworms, expelling roundworms. And as such any of these herbs that are for worms obviously have some toxicity, so you don't want to use wormwood for a protracted period of time at all. Just use it when you need it. Actually the name wormwood does not refer to its expelling worms as I just learned, but it comes from the old German word Vermut, which means preserver of the mind. Which is a little bit ironic because actually this herb in its alcohol form, which is called absinthe, was banned for quite a while because people thought it was destroying people's minds. In fact, so the drink absinthe was invented by Henry Pernod in about 1797 and it got very popular, especially with French soldiers returning from the foreign legion, where apparently they drank a lot of it, thinking that it helped with parasites in the tropics I suppose. And then it really caught on with the sort of bohemian artistic class and the big name everybody remembers is Toulouse-Lautrec, who did all these very well-known posters of Parisian highlife nightclubs, dancing and so on in late, well early 19th century. And so this became very popular with that group of people and it was apparently somewhat addictive and the idea was that it was destroying people's livers and really messing up their brains. And so it was gradually banned starting about 1910 until 20 years ago there was only, I think, one country in Europe, maybe it was Czechoslovakia, where you could actually buy absinthe, true absinthe, meaning absinthe that contained thujone, which is the active ingredient or the psychoactive ingredient in this wormwood is a compound called thujone. So it's kind of controversial. It appears in other herbs like thuja, for example, which is what it's named for, that's arborvitae. Just how psychoactive it is or just how dangerous it is, I'm not really up on it. Recently it has been re-legalized in most countries in Europe and now you can buy absinthe, which I believe is actually made with this herb and would have the thujone in it. So that's all happened just in the last little while, but that's just a side aspect of this plant. So if you wanted to make the psychoactive absinthe, you would want to distill out and get the essential oil called thujone from this. As a garden plant, it's quite easy to grow. It's a kind of a sub-shrub, as you can see, not really woody. It can be grown from seeds, not too difficult. Plants seed in the autumn, likes a period of cold, likes a full sun, well-drained, possibly slightly alkaline situation, but nothing here is alkaline and it's growing just fine. I just have it on this little raised bank, as you can see. It can be divided as well. So that's wormwood, Artemisia absinthe.