If you take a stroll along a stream or in a damp meadow in midsummer, your nostrils may be tickled by a soft, sweet, almost honey-like fragrance. It's probably the Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) that's welcoming you. Majestic, discreet and powerful all at once, this wild plant is an essential part of traditional herbalism.
But there's an art to it: knowing how to recognise it, how to pick it with respect and how to use it wisely. Here's what you need to know.
🌸 How can you recognise Meadowsweet for sure?
Meadowsweet can grow up to 1m20 tall. It can usually be spotted in damp areas, such as ditches, river banks or flood meadows. Here are a few key characteristics to make sure you don't confuse it:
- Stems: erect, sturdy, often tinged with red.
- Leaves: large, alternate, made up of numerous small toothed leaflets with a downy white underside.
- Flowers: white to cream, grouped in frothy, airy clusters, with a distinctive vanilla or almond fragrance.
- Flowering: from June to August.
👉 Be careful not to confuse it with giant hogweed or certain poisonous umbellifers: Meadowsweet does not have a hollow stem and is not umbellate.
🌿 Benefits and medicinal properties
Meadowsweet is nicknamed ‘plant aspirin’, and not for nothing. In fact, it contains salicylated derivatives, the natural ancestors of acetylsalicylic acid, used in pain and fever remedies.
Its recognised properties include:
- 🔥 Anti-inflammatory: relieves joint pain, rheumatism, osteoarthritis.
- 🌡️ Antipyretic: lowers fever.
- 💧 Diuretic: promotes renal elimination, useful against water retention or cellulite.
- 💆♂️ Analgesic: eases headaches, muscular or dental pain.
- 🛡️ Detoxifying: used in gentle drainage cures.
It is therefore often used as a background plant in herbal teas against chronic pain or benign inflammatory disorders.
🍵 How should it be used?
Meadowsweet is best consumed as an infusion or decoction:
- Infusion: 1 to 2 tablespoons of dried flowering tops in 250 ml of hot water. Leave to infuse for 10 minutes. Drink up to 3 times a day.
- Decoction for footbaths or poultices: boil 30g of plant in 1 litre of water, leave to cool and then apply.
⚠️ Important precaution: as with aspirin, Meadowsweet is not recommended for people allergic to salicylates, pregnant and breast-feeding women, or children under the age of 12.
🌾 Where can you find it and how do you pick it?
- Where? Mainly in French-speaking Switzerland, in damp meadows, on the banks of streams and marshy areas. The cantons of Vaud, Fribourg and Neuchâtel are rich in natural sites.
- When does it grow? The flowering tops are harvested in July-August, when the flowers are in full bloom.
- How to harvest? Cut off the flowers with a few centimetres of stem, using secateurs, never at the root. Never remove more than a third of a bed, to preserve resources.
Once picked, dry the flowers in the shade in a dry, airy place, then store them in airtight jars.
🌼 In Brief
Reine-des-Prés is a true treasure of nature, both gentle and powerful. It perfectly embodies the spirit of wild gathering: respect for the environment, knowledge of plants, and a return to simple, natural solutions.
Gathered with care and used wisely, it will quickly become an essential ally in your daily well-being.