6 plants that grow near water and are healing: know their properties

Advisor: Josep María Teixé, herbalist at El Manantial de Salud

Along the course of rivers, lakes and streams, bordering canals and ditches, a wide diversity of plants who have in their favor abundant availability of moisture and an always cool climate thanks to the effect of evapotranspiration.

Are plants and trees in general with a leafy appearancewhich depend to a greater or lesser extent on the fixed existence of water.

Medicinal plants linked to water can be curative and some of them, such as horsetail, licorice, hawthorn or marshmallow, also constitute an irreplaceable element in any herbalist. In this article we have six of the most representative.

Types of plants linked to water

exist three types of plants linked to water:

Those who live immersed in it, like duckweed, water lilies and becabunga. Those that have their base sunken in it, such as reeds, aromatic calamus or rice. Those who live by his side, such as willows, loosestrife, alders, euparium and artemisia, among many others.

This last group usually appears in plant formations that are arranged longitudinally along the riverbeds or the contour of the water, and in many cases they appear as more or less thick forest cordons.

are the called riverside forests, so punished by human action, but so necessary for the health of rivers, by preventing or mitigating the effects of floods.

In addition to its biological importanceas controller of the floods of water and for its filtering effect, the riverside vegetation, which is very rich and diverse, includes many species with recognized medicinal attributes.

This is the case of plants as beautiful as loosestrife, loosestrife or hirsute fireweedof others as primitive as horsetails and ferns, as aromatic as chasteberry and pennyroyalsome of which are as rare and threatened as the water clover or the carnivorous sundew, of trees as common as willow or alder and species as useful as rice and bamboo.

And some of them, like horsetail, licorice, hawthorn or marshmallow, They also constitute an irreplaceable element in any herbalist.

Properties of aquatic plants

Riverside medicinal plants do not have to share the same medicinal potential, much less a coincident biochemical composition, since they are very diverse species, but it seems as if by the greater availability of water would tend to stimulate the movement of internal body watersthat is, they would result in the end more diuretic and purifyingas evidenced in the case of horsetail, birch or cress.

And they are many too which have astringent and antidiarrheal effects, very suitable for the summer season. Two other points in common are their late flowering tendencywhich doesn’t start until late spring or during the summer, and the fact that they concentrate on the aerial parts their medicinal importance.