The plant elecampare roots contain insulin or diabetic sugar.
Chamomilla Regugita or Feverfew corn also goes by the name German Chamomile.
Nicholas Culpepper's "The Complete Herbal" was first published in 1649 - and there has been 41 different editions.
Out of a 100 most common herbs, there are only 5 that do not go by any other name; apple, cranberry, licorice, dill, and hyssop.
Bananas aren't fruit! They are a type of herb. Bananas die after fruiting, like all herbs do.
"Wort" is an old English word for "plant" - as in Mugwort
Before the invention of plastic, many medicines came in square tin containers, as tin was cheaper and easier to produce than glass, and didn't break in shipping.
Dandelion root can be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.
Honey is used sometimes for antifreeze mixtures and in the center of golf balls.
Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as medicine.
Most alcoholic beverages contain all 13 minerals necessary to sustain human life.
Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
Strawberries have more vitamin c than oranges. And is considered a receptacle not a fruit.
The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.
Tomatoes were originally thought to be poisonous.
Capsaicin, which makes hot peppers "hot" to the human mouth, is best neutralized by casein, the main protein found in milk.
Saffron, made from the dried stamens of cultivated crocus flowers, is the most expensive cooking spice.
Vanilla is the extract of fermented and dried pods of several species of orchids.
When honey is swallowed, it enters the blood stream within a period of 20 minutes.
Almonds are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.
Until 1883, hemp was the world's largest agricultural crop, from which the majority of fabric, soap, paper, medicines, were produced.
Arrowroot, an antidote for poisoned arrows, is used as a thickener in cooking.
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis sativa (marijuana) on their plantations.
From the 1500's to the 1700's, tobacco was prescribed by doctors to treat a variety of ailments including headaches, toothaches, arthritis and bad breath.
Ginger has been clinically demonstrated to work twice as well as Dramamine for fighting motion sickness, with no side effects.
Interesting fact about marijuana is that marijuana cures/prevents more than 100 diseases including cancer and depression
In 1865 opium was grown in the state of Virginia and a product was distilled from it that yielded 4 percent morphine. In 1867 it was grown in Tennessee: six years later it was cultivated in Kentucky. During these years opium, marijuana and cocaine could be purchased legally over the counter from any druggist.
Morphine was given its name in 1803 by the discoverer, a 20 year old German pharmacist named Friedrich Saturner. He named it after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.
No species of wild plant produces a flower or blossom that is absolutely black, and so far, none has been developed artificially.
The saguaro cactus of the Arizona Desert grows less than one inch in its first 10 years
The largest single flower is the Rafflesia or "corpse flower". They are generally 3 feet in diameter with the record being 42
It takes approximately two million flowers for a bee to make 1 lb of honey
Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, corn, tobacco, peanuts, chocolate, vanilla, squash, pumpkin, zucchini, and sunflowers are all native to the Americas, and did not exist in the rest of the world before Columbus.
The grapefruit is a hybrid between the pomelo and the orange.
40% of prescription drugs dispensed in the U.S. have active ingredients derived from plants, animals or microorganisms, many of them from forests.
Willow bark, which provides the salicylic acid from which aspirin was originally synthesized, has been used as a pain remedy ever since the Greeks discovered its therapeutic power nearly 2,500 years ago
Rice paper isn't made from rice but from a small tree which grows in Taiwan.
... Now you know!
