Teasel - Plant Identification, Uses and Folklore

Hello there, welcome back. In this video we're going to be taking a look at the teasel. These are teasels, either side of me, and it grows particularly well in very, very poor soil. It's one of the early colonisers of disturbed ground or wastelands. Here's a decent place, it's a very exposed site, very dry, but here we've got teasel in all three stages of its life cycle. We've got it as a very young plant, see the star shape that it grows in. We've got it as the semi-mature plant. which we'll get the seed head on and we've also got it as the mature dead plant and that's what's very very useful this head this seed head it's got no real food source not to us anyway but it produces a lot of seeds which are very good for goldfinches and other seed-eating birds in the back end of the year and one of the iconic pictures of goldfinches is them clinging onto here and eating the seeds out of this lovely seed head it's a beautiful shaped thing have a look at that Absolutely beautiful. And back in the day, a long time ago, before modern machinery was invented, teasels used to actually be used to tease, well, teasel, tease, to tease fibres from wool. So you'd rub the wool like that and it would tease all the fibres one way, making it much easier to spin. And that was later replaced by metal pads with hooks on. Can't really find any specific lore relating to teasels, I'm surprised at that because it's a really nice unusual looking plant, I would have thought it would have had some sort of magical use back in the day, but it doesn't appear to have, so if you've heard of anything, please put it in the comments section down below. Now really the only law that I can find relating to teasel involves the water, which collects in the base of the leaves, and apparently that was called Tears of Venus, and weary travellers would dip their finger in. Rub their tired eyes and it would rejuvenate their eyes. I'm not too sure about that, though. It's basically just untreated rainwater in there with all sorts of muck from flying insects and things that'll be crawling round in and on the plant. So I wouldn't be rubbing that into my eyes. Now, it hasn't rained for days, and this is a ridiculously dry site. Look at that. We've got the tears of Venus in there. So if you're feeling brave and you want to rub that manky water into your eyes, be my guest. And really, as a medicinal plant, it doesn't appear to have that many uses either, or that many recorded uses from the West. But in the East, i.e. in Asian cultures, apparently it's very, very good for muscle pain, joint aches, and it's often used as an anti-inflammatory as well. That's particularly the roots and the flowers. And the flowers would just form around here, a little bit like a thistle flower. Like a sort of a lilac-y sort of a colour, bluey-purple-y colour going all the way around here. It really, really looks nice when they're flowering. Unfortunately, these ones aren't flowering, so I'll put a picture on now. So apparently the flowers and also the root would be used to make up various treatments for those aforementioned ailments. But really, to us outdoorsmen, it is a good tinder. Now these lovely little seed heads aren't just useful for flower arranging and they'll take a spark very very nicely. Design of it looks perfect to catch the spark. I'm going to give it another go. I'm going to use this one to catch the flame and then hopefully broken up ones to hold the flame. Yep, breaking them up definitely helps. That's holding the flame much better. That's going to give your fire a good chance to grow to the next level. Now if, like me, If plant knowledge isn't one of your fortes, you might want to check out the links in the video description. I've put links to a few books and also Wikipedia. So if you're interested in learning more about any of the plants featured in these different videos that I've got in this particular series, check out the video description. Just click show more and the full video description will come up. So there you go, that's the teasel. That was very short and sweet. Useful to seed-eating birds, it's useful as a tinder, and if we ever become enlightened enough to use it in the west, it may be useful for inflammatory diseases and joint pain. Hope you've enjoyed this very, very short video. If you have, hit the thumbs up, check out my other videos, and I shall see you next time. How quickly that goes up.