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Herb of the Month

A Mountain Healer--Arnica montana and Arnica mollis

My relationship with arnica began, or so I thought, in a little shop where I bought a bottle of arnica massage oil because it smelled good and was on sale for half price. I vaguely remembered the name arnica as being especially potent, and I knew intuitively that this lavender-plus-lemon smell, with an edge of something stronger like turpentine or camphor, would have a place in my life. "Uplifting" was the best word I could summon, and at first I used the oil for simple massage when muscles or spirits needed a lift.

A friend clarified things when I pulled a muscle at her house. Arnica is the homeopathic and herbal remedy of choice for muscle and joint injuries as well as bumps and bruises, even fractures, dislocations, and concussions (any injury where the skin is unbroken). My friend gave me a soothing, warm-handed rub with the oil, which she told me was made with the flowers, leaves, and roots of arnica. Because the pull was serious, she then doled out some very small round white arnica pills to dissolve under my tongue. Taken internally, arnica is poisonous, except in these tiny homeopathic doses that jolt the body back into balance. Her treatment worked! Not in the sense of a miraculous cure but my injury seemed to quickly go on the mend and became a distant memory in a day or so.

I've learned that an arnica oil massage is standard treatment for a whole range of injuries that active people experience--strains and sprains from athletic injuries; pulled muscles from working out (or even sometimes from yoga!); the aches and pains of aging joints; and bruises from blows and falls. Arnica helped me during my recent move from one third story apartment to another about a mile away. After lugging dozens of heavy boxes to and from my heavy-lidded hatch-back, I had two lumps on my head, a dozen small bruises, and the inevitable sore muscles, not to mention severe dis-orientation. With each rub, I took pleasure in the smell and I felt the quickening of the healing process.

To relieve injury externally with oils and tinctures, arnica has always been a "people's herb"--used by everyone, not just trained herbalists. Yet this herb is severely toxic when used internally, and some people even become dizzy or have other allergic reactions to external applications. It is very important not to "play around" with arnica, but to seek professional assistance for any uses beyond what I've described so far. Homeopaths use arnica to treat insomnia in cases where people have overexerted either physically or mentally and are too tired to fall asleep. And it is valued for treating mental or spiritual debilitation--from shock to other kinds of dizziness or collapse, and agitation.

Arnica can be grown in gardens, but its history is in the mountains. Throughout human settlement of the European alps (where it is now a protected species), arnica has been used not only for blows and wounds but also for a wide range of other complaints like colds and infections. Its toxic properties are recognized in common names like wolfsbane and leopard's bane. It is also known as mountain tobacco. Although I haven't found written accounts, indigenous healers in the western hemisphere certainly knew many uses of arnica, especially among those peoples who traveled to mountainous areas to seek vision and healing.

Still, until last summer, I thought of arnica as a name and a pleasing and useful product in a bottle. I didn't realize that I knew the plant myself. It was on a backpacking trip into remote parts of the Sierra Nevada, where I'd often hiked and climbed in my teens and twenties, that I rediscovered arnica in the wild. Last winter's snows made this an amazing year for wildflowers---carpets of color and memories of many plants I'd known in my youth flooded my senses. On the first day out, I took off my pack at about a 9,000 foot elevation near a patch of yellow daisy-like flowers whose name I couldn't recall right away. I sat down heavily amongst the flowers. I had been climbing steadily for several hours with a pack weighing over fifty pounds, my shoulder muscles were starting to ache, and my head was spinning in the unaccustomed altitude. The bruised leaves I was sitting on re-leased a soothing and vaguely familiar odor of lemon and lavender with a whiff of tur-pentine. Pictures in wildflower guides and herbal books flashed across my mind, and I realized: this is Arnica mollis, the Sierra's version of A. montana! How perfectly placed for climbers with sore muscles and dazed minds! I picked a few leaves to rub and smell when I needed a lift, thinking I might want to rub their juices into my shoulder muscles if the aches got too bad.

Later on in the trip I got a chance to study the plant in more detail. On our rest day at a place called Bear Lake Basin about 11,000 feet above sea level, I found a lush garden of arnica growing in deep rich soil between boulders along a steep stream bed. Arnica mollis looks just like the arnica of the herbal books. The plant is about a foot high with bright yellow blooms like inch-and-a-half sunflowers borne on slightly sticky, resinous stalks above a flourishing set of basal leaves. Leaves, stems, and buds all carry these tiny sticky hairs which bear the wonderful smell of the plant. I lay on my back among clumps of arnica trying to photograph it against the amazing blue mountain sky, and went back to camp feeling surrounded with its energy.

The same species, Arnica mollis, also grows on the east coast among the cliffs and high slopes of the Gaspe peninsula and in the highest parts of the White Mountains--apparently part of that small community of arctic plants that remain along the border zones of the last great glaciers. (Another species, A. acaulis, grows in woods near the Pennsylvania and Delaware coast.) It is wonderful to realize that long before and throughout the deterioration of our environment during the past few hundred years, the fragrant arnica has continued to assist humans with violent injury, shock, and general uplift.

Louise Dunlap teaches yoga and writing, and is working on a book called Writing for Social Change.