Plant of the Week
Zingiber officinale, Zingiberaceae
Ginger
Plant essence guidance for the soul:
Ginger’s essence will assist you to bring those parts of you together through love. You can prepare the body with this essence to receive the love energy through you.
Enjoy the experience and this will assist with the flow of energy through your body. Bringing together the fire and the ice through love.
Interesting tidbits:
Culinary ginger is the thick rhizome of a perennial herb. The ginger we get today comes from India, China, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. It has stems up to a metre and a half tall, with narrow thirty-centimetre glossy bright-green leaves at the end of the stems.
In the summer ginger produces flowers, although these are rarely seen. The flowers are yellowish-green with a purple lip marked with yellow.
Ginger is a distant relative of the banana. It gets its name from the Latin translation of the Sanskrit word singabera, which means “shaped like a horn.”
Ginger adds flavour to food and may also act as an antioxidant.
Ginger is one of the world’s oldest and most popular medicinal plants. It is used in folk medicine almost everywhere. In China a tea is made for coughs, colds, and the flu, as well as for strengthening lungs and kidneys.
In Japan ginger oil is used in massage for spinal and joint problems. A piece of cotton wool soaked in ginger oil is used for earache, and people take ginger baths for arthritis, headaches, and spinal pain. A warm footbath of ginger invigorates the whole body.
Ginger may also relieve the misery of motion sickness. Some people find ginger in food irritating to the stomach, but for others it can stimulate appetite. Externally, ginger compresses may be applied to the face as an effective sinus treatment.
Ginger root was said to be an indicator for ancient herbalist when having to prepare decoctions in the wild for whether another plant is poisonous. The plant in question is boiled in water with a piece of ginger root. The ginger would turn blue if the other plant is poisonous.
Ginger is widely used in soft drinks, including colas and ginger ales.
To make “pink ginger” for a garnish, use young ginger roots. Peel or scrape away the skin, slice the root very thin, dip it in lemon juice and season with salt. The lemon juice turns the ginger root pink.