{"id":2481,"date":"2026-08-11T13:25:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T17:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/?page_id=2481"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:12:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:12:37","slug":"echinacea","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/home\/tour\/echinacea\/","title":{"rendered":"Echinacea"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-is-layout-8f761849 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\"><a class=\"cl-button  \" href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/\" title=\"\">HOMEPAGE: YOUNGKEN MEDICINAL GARDEN<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\"><a class=\"cl-button  \" href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/home\/tour\/\" title=\"\">BACK TO START: TOUR HOME<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\"><a class=\"cl-button  \" href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/home\/tour\/cedar\/\" title=\"\">Previous: Eastern Red Cedar<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\"><a class=\"cl-button  \" href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/home\/tour\/mullein\/\" title=\"\">NEXT: MULLEIN<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\"><a class=\"cl-button  \" href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/home\/tour\/tomaquag-museum\/\" title=\"\">END OF TOUR: HISTORY OF TOMAQUAG MUSEUM<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Description <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Also known as purple coneflower, echinacea <em>(Echinacea purpurea)<\/em> is a perennial in the Daisy family known for its prickly cone center and downward-extending flowers that come in white, yellow, pink, or purple. Echinacea is commonly used for immune support, and its leaves, petals, and roots can be used in teas and tinctures as an herbal remedy. Other uses include reducing inflammation, lowering blood sugar, and in some cases within tribal communities, treating certain venomous bites from snakes or spiders. While the entire plant can be used, the roots are where the most potent medicinal efficacy lies, sometimes referred to as black root.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/files.nccih.nih.gov\/echinacea-steven-foster-square.jpg\" alt=\"Photograph of echinacea, which features pink flowers with spiky, orange centers and surrounded by dark green leaves. \" style=\"width:734px;height:auto\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" \/>\n\n\n\n<!-- iframe plugin v.6.0 wordpress.org\/plugins\/iframe\/ -->\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/soundcloud%253Atracks%253A2307060119&#038;color=%23ff5500&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;show_comments=true&#038;show_user=true&#038;show_reposts=false&#038;show_teaser=true\" title=\"Echinacea\" class=\"iframe-class\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" \/>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Audio Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Another plant that&#8217;s really great for your immune system is purple coneflower, also known as echinacea. Echinacea is one of those plants that are fantastic to start to grow in your gardens. Anywhere you put it, it will take and do pretty well. It will continue to come up on its own. It doesn&#8217;t need a lot of grooming and care. It will just keep coming up and expanding over the years. And then you have this wonderful medicine plant for free in your yard, giving you healing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>And there&#8217;s lots of different ways of engaging with it. If you let it blossom, just when the petals start to come and they&#8217;re still kind of curled over, you can harvest the petals and the cone and use them to make your tea. You can use young leaves that are closer to that top and collect those as well. It&#8217;ll make a really nice medicine tea that&#8217;s a great immune booster. It also has a really pleasant taste to it. And that is a good way of harvesting because it&#8217;ll just keep reflowering. So you can actually get more than one growth out of a season. However, the most potent medicine is actually the roots. And there are tribal communities that refer to that as black root. And the root of it is actually pretty good too. It actually tastes pretty good and it has much more effectiveness as a medicine. And you make a tea from that that can be taken. There are tinctures that can be made from it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>There were some tribal communities that even used it as a treatment for certain venomous bites from different animals to help to heal from spiders and snakes. So it was really thought of as a very effective medicine to the point that during early colonization, it was over harvested for its use as a medicine. So we don&#8217;t see it as prevalent in our native environment. But it&#8217;s a plant that we can certainly return there because it does so well when we introduced. It&#8217;s a native pollinator, so it&#8217;ll bring all of those pollinators to the yard. So it&#8217;s a wonderful thing to bring back.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>I always recommend utilizing those parts that are going to replicate more often and saving those roots for significant need because every time you uproot a plant, you&#8217;ve now removed it from the environment and so there&#8217;s less and less of it available. So you want to be mindful of that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<a class=\"cl-button  \" href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/home\/tour\/mullein\/\" title=\"\">Next: mullein<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Description Also known as purple coneflower, echinacea (Echinacea purpurea) is a perennial in the Daisy family known for its prickly cone center and downward-extending flowers that come in white, yellow, pink, or purple. Echinacea is commonly used for immune support, and its leaves, petals, and roots can be used in teas and tinctures as an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5523,"featured_media":0,"parent":2470,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-2481","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2647,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2481\/revisions\/2647"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/youngken-garden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}